Company culture

Main Goal

The main goal of our company is to help people fulfil themselves.

You cannot force a person to fulfil themselves — they must do it themselves — but we can create the conditions for self-fulfilment (or help to reach them).

Here are some of them:

• Understanding what you want / are able to fulfil yourself in
• Understanding what needs to be done to fulfil yourself
• Motivation
• Emotional support
• Material support
• Psychological support
• Feedback
• The absence of demotivating factors, such as:
  • Conflicts
  • Devaluing work
  • Suppressing initiative
  • A sense of injustice

Cooperation

People unite into a group to raise the overall quality of life together.

It is important to be able to cooperate in order to reach goals that cannot be achieved alone and that bring each group member incomparably more benefit than they could bring themselves on their own.

There is no need to try to do as much different work as possible — it can harm both the person and the company.

You should be able to work as a team and find the optimal way to distribute the workload.

It is important to learn to think not only within one person or family, but within the whole organization and then society.

People

It is important to understand that the company exists for the person, not the person for the company.

It is also important to balance the needs of people, society and the company’s success:

• If the company is not successful, it has no way to help people.
  • Airplanes have a good rule about this: “Put your own mask on first, then your child’s”
• If the people in the company are unhappy, what is a successful company for?
• If only a small group of people is happy, that is unfair and inefficient with respect to society (there are many people in the world who deserve the chance to feel good)
  • This does not mean we must invest in charities, but we can influence the world through the result of our work
  • This does not mean we must sacrifice our wellbeing, but we can choose a direction of development that benefits both us and society

Every member of the company deserves a stable salary and a job (without fearing they will lose it tomorrow), and deserves to reap the fruits of their work. Therefore every employee should have a revenue share from the product proportional to their contribution to it.

Contradictions to the culture

It is important to understand that not everyone can be happy due to their psychological makeup; not everyone enjoys work and self-fulfilment even in favourable conditions.

Our company may not suit such people.

For the company to function normally, we have to condemn:

• Deliberate theft, extortion, corruption and nepotism
  • By nepotism we mean hiring and/or promoting people not in the company’s interest
• Malicious damage to the company’s or its employees’ assets
• Deliberate lies
• Being conflict-prone or refusing conflict-resolution processes
• Persistently overstating one’s own importance relative to other members of the company
  • For example, the demand: “Give me better conditions than everyone else”
• Failing to fulfil one’s accepted duties
• Evading one’s accepted responsibility

We all came together to cooperate and improve the life of each participant in line with their contribution to the common cause, to make something good and influence the world around us — not to blindly extract personal gain.

Trust and control

We prefer a culture of trust over a culture of control.

At first we cannot know a person, their values, intentions and so on.
But we must not treat a person badly if they do not deserve it.
So we trust a person until proven otherwise.

Control systems create extra operational costs and an atmosphere of distrust in the company, implying that every employee is a thief, a liar and a bad apple.
It makes sense to minimize control systems and strive to trust one another.

If we see a person grossly violating the rules of being in the company (for example, stealing), they will be dismissed and stripped of all privileges.

The organization should be clear and open to people.

Trust between people is very important.
And you must understand that trust is not when you are able to hide something, but when you can open up.
Trust is maintained when you share information with a person; when you hide something, it is lost.

It is also important to understand that trust does not mean permissiveness.
We have to keep some limits to avoid the risk of harming the company or its employees.

Growth of the organization

An organization is a living organism.
Every person is unique; people come and go, people change.
An organization consists of people, so it is just as changeable, adapting to people’s needs and to the surrounding reality.

An organization should be flexible and evolving, open to experiments and able to restructure at any moment.

Although every person and their role is valuable, sooner or later a person may change and switch roles or leave, so their role becomes vacant.

We must avoid making a person irreplaceable in their role — automate, raise successors, write instructions, and reduce the organization’s dependence on a role and a specific person (this especially applies to the CEO and other management roles).

Do not fear becoming unneeded. You will always have work you enjoy and can develop your own projects within the organization (especially given the possibility of horizontal scaling) and beyond it (we should help and cooperate with other organizations when it aligns with our goal).

Everyone in the organization should be able to know how it works from start to finish and to gain the experience they need.