My key takeaways from Culture Rocks vol. 6

2 weeks ago I attended with our amazing people ops team the conference about inspiring Czech companies with inspiring company cultures — Culture Rocks organized by Company Culture Market in the lead with Petr Skondrojanis. What I really like about Culture Rocks is that you can listen to stories of leaders of these companies that realize the importance of building a healthy company culture. I am truly convinced that “a fish stinks from the head” so it is always great to have leaders in the companies that realize that you need to care about company culture 🙏🏻

I expected a ton of inspiration because I perceive COCUMA companies as a little island of positive deviation in the field of company cultures here in the Czech Republic. And I truly believe that this little island will have a bigger and bigger impact in this important business area. Which company culture definitely is — no doubt 🙃

Petr Skondrojanis interviewed on the stage of Chaple Sacre Coeur 7 inspiring leaders during the event including our very own CTO of productboard Daniel Hejl 🚀

If you want to hear more about what has been discussed during the conference — let’s have a look together at my key takeaways from several talks 👇

Czech Holacracy “by feelings”

Radek Majer (TTC Teleport)

TTC Teleport stands on principles of holacracy despite the fact that they originally did not realize that fact. They just felt that it should work in the company in that kind of way. It means that they do have extremely simplified but still thoughtful functioning of the company. Result? They have only 4 established processes in the company that help them to manage and run the company

• recruitment
• offboarding
• feedback
• change

This whole principle of the way of working in TTC Teleport stands on a high level of trust

• open information — everyone knows everything
• candid feedback
• faults — they can fail with the mindset that they tried their best at the moment

They do the recruitment in a bit unorthodox but definitely functional way

• everyone can hire a person to the company
• 3 rounds of process held in approximately 1 hour — every one of the company might be involved — in the end, everyone who was a part of the process must agree on hiring this new person

Final tip from Radek on How to “create” company values (the process of discovering them). Simply — just put it down on the paper

• What do we expect from the company?
• How do we want to behave to each other inside the company, to our suppliers, to the environment

It’s all about the people

Jan Kaštura (Inventi)

It’s all about the people is the key principle of managing Inventi Development by Jan Kaštura. Regarding his answers during the talk with Petr Skondrojanis on the stage, they truly live this principle in Inventi. The company vision for the year 2021 was somehow formed by all 220 people of Inventi.

I really love Inventi’s wall of handprints! It is not just a nice decoration of a cool company — how it might look like. But in Inventi there is a story behind this wall. They realize that everyone who has ever worked for Inventi made a difference and own imprint into the story of the company. He/she devoted a specific amount of energy, time and simply part of his/her life to the company and the company appreciates that a lot.

Expiry period of employee

Marie Havlíčková (Slevomat)

Marie is for me one of a few examples and inspiration here in the Czech Republic that even at a quite young age you can become a successful leader. Regarding her words, she had to make 2 important decisions during her 6 years of leading Slevomat.

• Do not set up company just by blindly following some of the frameworks
• Answer this question for me: “What does success really mean?” Success regarding leading Slevomat means for Marie to hear nice stories from people that actually left Slevomat. She would not ever want to hear something like: “Well, Slevomat is ok, but never more…” I think that is nice “why” for the leader of the company and that this is one of the ways how proper employer brand should be built (not only by leaflets and nice career website)

She also mentioned 4 key elements of people management in the company — these elements are connected and determine and support each other. When 1 of them does not work other elements suffer as well.

• trust
• engagement
• freedom
• responsibility

Practical use case of these 4 elements might be something that Marie calls “expiry period of employee” — regarding Marie’s observation there is a need to give a dose of engagement to an employee (in horizontal or vertical way) after approximately every 2–2,5 years. Otherwise there might be a problem with this employee and there is a serious risk that he/she won’t be satisfied.

Values really matter in company that is striving to make products that matter

Daniel Hejl 🚀

I do not feel so comfortable speaking about Daniel’s talk. For some reasons 😅🙈. The core of his talk with Skondr was mostly about the importance of our values and what they mean to us. So I would like to share with you our productboard’s values with a little explanation of what they mean to us.

• Curiosity — We rely on our teammates’ curiosity to understand the deepest needs of our customers. We always ask WHY?
• Work with purpose — We always understand the current objectives and strive to work on things that matter the most. We speak up when we feel otherwise.
• Creativity — We are creative and seek inspiration from the best in any and all fields. We come up with several options and we test and iterate until we hit our goals.
• Emotional design — We appreciate the emotional aspect of design in addition to the functional one. We seek meaningful connections with our users and believe there’s a virtue in simplicity.
• Relentless improvement — We relentlessly innovate and improve our tools, processes, and organization and we expect everyone to contribute throughout.
• Transparency — We all have access to the company’s business metrics. We celebrate our progress and we learn from our setbacks.
• Teamwork — We work together as a team, leveraging each other’s expertise and experience, regardless of where in the world each of us may be.

Actually we are thinking about some revision of these values since we grew a lot in the last year and we want to be sure that we all are on the same boat and aligned regarding our values. So stay tuned about that! We would love to share with you our process of redesigning our values once it is finished!

So nice to hear Daniel’s talk, be there with my colleagues but also to meet my beloved ex-colleagues from Impact Hub 🤗

Company as a hockey team 🏒

Tomáš Vránek ICE Industrials

• Tips for books 📚 from Tomáš: Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal and Maverick by Ricardo Semler
• The company is for him something like a hockey team — there should be the same kind of friendship!
• People in ICE got the full access to its accounting
• They published salaries of management despite that fact a lot of people told them not to do that! Guess what happened after publishing? Nothing.
• Thanks to cross-functional teams in ICE created in non-hierarchical organization structure across the company the engagement of employees is still really good!
• Salary reductions are made according to the expectations from the rest of the team — how much the “hockey team” really appreciates your value for the team performance?

CEO’s main goal is to care about company culture

Michal Strcula — AirBank

The sentence above Michal mentioned at the beginning of his talk and I knew at that moment that the final talk will be at least as much interesting as the previous talks. It is amazing that this sentence was not said by CEO of a “cool startup”, but of bank that cares about almost 1 000 employees :)

Michal talked most of the time about internal communication tools. They are doing a lot in the area of internal communication:

• public written record from leadership meeting sent to every employee (Yes! Even in the bank)
• steering committee — the highest leadership people are during whole Thursday available to help people in their projects and answering questions regarding these projects
• News Market — all-hands meeting held one time per month, all branches as well as headquarters are connected and leadership answer questions. Sometimes there are a bit unconventional questions regarding softness of toilet paper — but Michal realizes that answering this kind of questions is building the trust as well
• Interesting insight for me was also that despite the fact that the company employ now about 850 employees Michal is still present at every welcome session with newstarters