Great companies are built when people with a shared sense of purpose come together. And they live and work by a shared set of philosophies, principles & belief systems. This in essence, shapes the culture of the company.
As Jack Welch puts it in his book Winning – “The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there.”
Having core values helps everyone in the decision making process. When you are in doubt, look at the core values of the company. You core values also determine how clients and vendors look at you & understand what you are about.
To be honest, it is not easy to come up with a set of value systems and you can’t just copy-paste value systems of another company. At guch, It has taken us a lot to time to come up with these sets of behaviours and its mostly decided by how our early set of employees live and work. If you carefully examine that, you can put together your value system.
guch delivers high quality video content at speed & scale all over the world!
The central most important core value for our business is “obsession for creative excellence”. Unless what we ship is excellent, we will not win in the market. Simply put, our core value is “Creative Excellence” and hence we go to the absolute extreme to ensure what we are shipping is quality. This is true for what we put out as marketing & also for what we deliver to our clients. Hence, this value is not just shared by our employees, but also our network of guch pros. We also love it when our clients push us hard – not because of personal ego, but because of creative obsession.
- Originality and ingenuity – We want to leave a mark with every project we do. We want to be better than ourselves, better than people who came before us, better at everything we do. We want to conquer our fear of the unknown.
- Intelligence
- Unerring
The next one is a customer first mindset. Every team member be it Product or Delivery or Marketing has to think customer first, we will not win otherwise.
As a business that delivers creative according to the client’s need, this principle took a lot of time for us to put into practice. Creators like to do things their way and feel that’s the best quality product. But, sometimes you have to empathize with the customer’s needs. While our team & the guch pros is encouraged to fight till the last breath to drive their points home during any discussion with clients, you have to ultimately ensure the customer’s needs are met as the final product is being used by him/her.
- Understand the customer’s needs deeply
- Timely Delivery
- Always communicating
- Be Fair Always
Be Good. Do Good. Additionally, there is no place for people who lie and steal. At the same time, it’s a given that you have to be hard working to win. While I generally don’t like to add these words to the Values document, its important to do so as we scale
- Humility
- Assertiveness
- Authenticity
- Accountability
- Learning & Upskilling
Be a learning machine – The only way you win at personal growth or business is when you get better everyday.
(1+ 0.01)^365 = 37.8
(1- 0.01)^365 = 0.03
As you grow as business, you will also have to slightly tweak this document to add or deduct behaviors according to how you are headed. Excited to see how this will evolve for us in the years to come.
As a final note, its not just enough to have this written on a blog. The core values have to reiterated at every occasion, stuck as posters on walls and practiced & preached by everyone. When a fellow colleague asks a question around taking a decision at work, I retort, “What would your decision be? Use the core values framework to take the decision.