What is a good culture? (apart from blue cheese of course)

by | May 19, 2013 | General, Optimal Company | 0 comments

Thinking back to all the places I have worked before I started OptimalBI, a lot of my memories are rose tinted (enhanced) or dark grey (clouded) by the culture that I perceived was endemic at the company at that time.

Often the smaller team I was part of exhibited a different culture to the rest of the organisation (so times for the better sometimes not).  And I can also remember times when a new member of the team joined and the culture changed (again sometimes for the better sometimes not).

I have been slightly fixated on trying to guide OptimalBI to have a culture that represented a company I have always wanted to work for.

When Vic joined OptimalBI a few years ago, we decided that if we weren’t having fun we were doing something wrong.  Not to say we wanted to play all day and do no work, being unemployed with no money is not fun, so OptimalBI still needed to deliver value to our customers and be paid for that value we delivered.

When we did one of our first planning session we were lucky to have stumbled across Valves Employee Handbook.  The style and sentiments of that handbook embodied a lot of what kin of company I wanted to work at (hell I spent so many hours finding a desk with wheels we could buy so we could move them around the office when we felt like it like Valve).

Lately I have found a couple of other companies who’s style and culture are similar to what we are striving for at OptimalBI.

One of those is Hubspot and their CultureDeck.

In researching company manifesto’s and culture decks, I found a lot of articles with a positive opinion of Hubspots culture deck (and the Netflix one that they based the idea on).  Plus a few that were a little less complimentary.

Here are links to the articles in case you feel like having a read.

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