Corporate Culture: How to Implement and Reinforce Core Values in Remote Times
How to Implement and Reinforce Core Values in Remote Times
In part 1 of this series we talked about finding our vision and mission remotely and how doing that made a big difference for our team. In part 2 of the series we took you through the process of defining our company values to further understand HOW we wanted to achieve our goals. To put this in perspective, referring to Simon Sinek and his Golden Circle of WHY-HOW-WHAT: Our vision of “Empowering athletes to become their best'' is why we are at TRIQ. It’s the goal that really drives all of us. Our mission statement further defines HOW we want to achieve this on a product level and our values state HOW we want to get to the finish line in regards to our company culture and working together. Once you are at this point you get even closer to the WHAT (the things you actually do on a daily basis).
But even before that it was time to implement your vision, mission and values and to do that you first have to make sure everyone is aware of these statements.
As a CEO, I have gone through this process several times and it often happens that everything is forgotten soon and then it also tends to fade away in the way you act rather quickly. Everyone sort of had the sentence “you can read it on Confluence” in mind and from time to time I repeated the values or the vision and that was it. It wasn’t enough.
I am extremely happy that I can work with people at TRIQ who know both the importance of corporate culture and values but also know that it can be very theoretical content, especially in the beginning. Of course, we also "filed" these “items” in Confluence. But it was important to us that every employee really knows the vision, mission and core values at all times to give them a chance to live, work and decide according to them. Maximum freedom is great, but there should always be an underlying understanding of the spirit of our organization and our company culture present. So how do you do that?
Repetition—Sometimes—Really is the Father of Learning
Our CTO Stephan Bachofen had the great idea of setting up a weekly Kahoot quiz in our team meeting. There was some uncertainty: Quizzes are something competitive and there is always a loser. Do we want to communicate the ranking? Luckily, we have a sports mindset at TRIQ (you can lose, it happens) and great trust in each other. So, we decided after the first time that whoever placed last would set up the next quiz. And yes, it happened to me too. The level was so high after three sessions that you couldn't afford to slip up. In all honesty, we went very deep with the questions regarding our vision, mission and values. Sometimes it might have even gotten a bit silly. But you know what? That’s totally fine. Being silly together is something I can recommend. Especially since any question revolving around these core elements of our corporate culture helped to cement them in the back of everyone’s head.
How We Continued
After the first three months, I wanted to pause the quizzes for a while. We had reached our interim goal and all team members knew about our corporate culture, our vision, mission and core values. But what I found out was that the team wanted to continue the quizzes. We have now reduced the cadence and do one Kahoot every two weeks. What's also nice is that I got a first glimpse of how differently team members are integrating the values into their work, measuring their behavior and work based on them, as well as making decisions with those values in mind.
