A framework for creating compelling company values
Earlier this year, our People Operations team set out to review and update our company values. While our values had served us well, they were last reviewed in 2017, and the company and the world had changed significantly. It was time to refresh them to best reflect who we are today.
Since 2017, we’ve had the following six company values:
- Transparency
- Care Deeply
- Diversity is Strength
- Embrace Failure
- Dream Big
- Give Back
Over the past seven years, several company changes have impacted how we view those values:
- Being co-located in the same city in 2017 meant that we were able to participate in community building in a big way. We hosted events like Battlesnake (a programming competition that at its peak had 700 attendees) and Startup Slam (a tech conference). The COVID-19 pandemic limited our ability to host those events and in 2021, we became a fully remote company after seeing the great talent we could add to our team when recruiting talent across the country. Today, we have employees from BC to Ontario who are all part of different communities, so our previous “Give Back” value has become less and less important to the team.
- The growing success of our products and the expansion of our team have had a significant impact on how we work day-to-day. The goals we strive to achieve together are more ambitious, and we needed our company values to reflect that.
What steps did we take?
During a leadership team onsite in Q1, we each ranked 40 common company values to find our top choices and eliminate our least favorites. After a good discussion, we elicited common concepts to work from when crafting our new company values.
We also discussed which of our current values we really wanted to keep. We agreed that keeping “Transparency” was essential. It has been a foundational value for the company, and one that resonates strongly with the wider team.
From there, we workshopped four values, each with an accompanying description. After a few iterations, we decided that we had to bring back “Care Deeply” from our previous values as well. Caring about the success of our customers and coworkers is so foundational to our culture that it didn’t feel right to omit it.
Lastly, we had the larger team weigh in. We asked for help from the team to review the drafted values and bring any comments for discussion. Some great changes and additions came from that consultation, and our new values really feel like a team effort, fittingly.
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