The way we work: from values to decisions
Scaling culture and autonomous decision making around our core values
This article is written by Workpath’s CEO Johannes Mueller and Head of People Enablement Luisa Kraft.
At Workpath we are convinced that the path into a new working world starts in our own company. We aim to practice what we preach and follow the principles we stand for in all aspects of our work — towards colleagues, customers and partners. From the beginning on, our ambition has been to create environments where autonomous teams can thrive and do great work with purpose. Being conscious about the behaviors and qualities that make us and emphasizing core values over rules and processes is a central cornerstone to that.
Shared values are fundamentally important to create a common understanding of the work experience we want to provide and the future we want to build. They give guidance for everyday decisions as well as a direction for the growth and development of our team. Our values make sure we can rely on each other and function as an effective, well-aligned team. Identifying and sharpening them just like making sure they come alive everyday is an ongoing process. Nobody needs “values” that have been made up by someone as a pure aspiration instead of uncovering the authentic heart of what makes us. Nobody needs value posters on the wall that just look nice.
In this article we’d like to share Workpath’s core values and give insights into our process of defining, activating and scaling them to make sure we hire the right people and promote the behavior we value.
Uncovering our values and making them explicit
Every company has values — whether conscious or not — from the very beginning on. Actually, we are convinced you cannot choose or design a company’s values. They usually are a compilation of the values and beliefs of the first few people that initially started working together. The more people join, the more likely it is that a common understanding of its values gets lost. This frequently results in bad hiring decisions, rising conflicts and decreasing performance.
When founding Workpath, we started with defining operating principles (like “Practice what we preach”) and we still hold them up. However, we also realized we need to define authentic core values, or what some of us call it, the “Workpath DNA”, at an early stage. We wanted to make explicit what defines us and ensure that we can all be on the same page with regards to how we want to work together.
So how do you carve out and condense a set of values and beliefs from a group of diverse people to an authentic set of core values that are meaningful, distinct and at the same time easy to understand and consistent? Among other frameworks, our leadership team chose an approach called “Mission to Mars” in this process. We selected exemplary people who joined in the early days and who we would send to Mars if we were asked to have the very best of Workpath represented on the new planet. After agreeing on five (initially we only had four but then realized there was one important character trait of our team missing) of them, we discussed why we chose them and what character traits, skills and behaviors these persons showed that made them role models for us and for the way we wanted to work. Even though this only was a small group of selected people, in many cases our discussions made us realize that it were exactly these traits that defined the day-to-day experience and atmosphere at Workpath.
In the end, we agreed on the one core strength of each of these role models and we discussed how exactly we would define what we value in them. The five values derived from this were then challenged by various team members in order to find out whether these now defined values would work as a framework to provide feedback (if these are the things we value, everyone should be able to support each other in getting better on them), to understand relationships better (conflicts often rise between people with different strengths along the five values so analyzing these through the lens of our core values was a great test) and to chose new hires to join the team.
Workpath’s Core Values
So what defines Workpath? We are progressive, passionate, challenging and caring. We are hungry and heartful, entrepreneurial and analytical. There is a certain tension in our core values (e.g. in fiercely pushing while still caring for each other and taking the time to be diligent) which makes us unique and if balanced right, unleashes great energy.
We are fierce. We always push forward. We are relentless about solving relevant problems. With courage and confidence we master every challenge and we thrive in the face of ambitious goals.
We own things. We embrace responsibility and drive things passionately as entrepreneurs. We are accountable for the results we agreed on and give everyone the freedom to choose their own paths to success.
We stay critical. We challenge ourselves and others in what we do and how we do it in a constructive manner. That is how we discover new paths and help each other to continuously get better.
We care for each other. We support each other in great as well as in challenging times. We all contribute to a healthy and human work environment where everyone feels respected and appreciated.
We are diligent. We give everything to do things right. The care and the attention to detail we put into our work demonstrates how seriously we take our mission and how much we strive to create sustainable value.
Making Workpath’s big five visible, understandable and tangible for everyone in the company
Visibility — offline and online
Identifying and phrasing our values was an important first step to develop a shared understanding with the whole team. In addition, we wanted to make them visible for everyone to emphasize their relevance and keep them on top of our minds.
Even if it might have felt a bit staged for some colleagues in the beginning (isn’t the value poster in the elevator a cliche metaphor for superficial employer branding already?), bringing our values onto the walls in our offices created the kind of awareness and initial dialogue we wanted. In order to make sure people would have the possibility to read more about the origin and meaning of our values, we’ve also compiled a small guide in our internal knowledge hub.
Authentic examples to make our values tangible
We also wanted to highlight examples of our values coming to life, so everyone would be aware of their impact on work performance and team spirit. Among other initiatives, Workpath’s people team therefore launched a campaign called “Value Xperience”.
Small cards were distributed on which people could describe a situation they experienced when a colleague at Workpath demonstrated one of our core values in an exceptionally helpful and valuable way. To ensure proper examples, everyone was asked to describe the behavior they observed as well as its impact on the situation. These printed templates could be pinned to a wall and later handed to the respective colleagues as a personal gesture of appreciation.
In order to make these examples more visible in the whole company, some of the cards were, upon agreement of the respective people, presented at our bi-weekly town hall meetings. Also, we keep the cards that have been shared publicly at the wall as ongoing reminders and inspiration of how our core values come alive in everyday situations.
Incorporating our values in daily routines
If everyone in the company is aware of its shared values and identifies with them, they can be a great tool for collaboration, decision making, feedback and hiring. In fact, in these core processes of a business, accepted and authentic values unleash their full potential in scaling culture and performance when the organization is growing fast.
Collaboration & decision making
If everyone follows the same values and operating principles there are fewer misunderstandings working together. So, a common understanding of our values makes it much easier to proactively ask for help (‘We care for each other’) or give honest feedback in a professional manner (‘We stay critical’). At the same time they raise our awareness to recognize when others need our support. Furthermore, our values engage us to motivate team members to keep pushing forward (‘We are fierce’) .
Workpath’s values enable every team member to decide autonomously on decisions, whether large (“Is this the right customer for us?”) or small (“How should I phrase this email?”). By using our values as a basis for decision making, we reduce uncertainty and coordination effort.
Feedback & recognition
Our values provide guidance on how to structure and phrase feedback in a constructive, comprehensive and respectful manner.
At Workpath, every team member has a regular 1-on-1-meeting with their team lead. Our values thereby help us to give feedback as they define what kind of behavior we expect from each other and how we can improve. Thus, for self-reflection and mutual feedback, we regularly ask ourselves how well our behavior reflected our values, e.g. “In which ways have I been diligent during the last weeks?”.
However, not just in official conversations like the 1-on-1s but also in our daily interactions, it is great to see how colleagues refer to Workpath’s values when giving continuous feedback (e.g. “It’s great we’re making such rapid progress on this project — thank you for driving this and being so fierce!”).
Finding people that match us
Nothing is more motivating than coming to work and knowing that the people at your workplace share your values. Furthermore, this reduces friction and protects the stability and focus of high performing teams. In order to ensure that our culture scales with the company and its teams, our values play a crucial role in our hiring process.
They are particularly reflected in (the questions asked during) our job interviews. These questions give us the chance to get authentic examples of how the applicants understand and interpret our values, if they can identify with them and if they make a good fit for the team. At the same time applicants get to know us — and the way we work. This approach of a better mutual understanding has proven to be the most effective framework for our interviewing process.
Operationalizing our core values and ingraining them in hiring, feedback and decision making processes, but also in everyday company life, was an extremely important step to become a truly scalable organization.
It is great to see how our values of being fierce but also caring and diligent, of owning things as entrepreneurs and staying critical, can be experienced in our everyday behavior and in the decision making of our teams. But most importantly, we are thrilled to see how this is the foundation for attracting and empowering great talents that share our beliefs and ambitions.
If this article made you curious to join or learn more about Workpath, we are looking forward to hearing from you. Also, even if you are happy in your current job, we are glad to keep you posted about upcoming opportunities. Feel free to join our talent pool or to send a mail to jobs@workpath.com.
