May 7, 2020
Culture is the lived experience of shared values, beliefs, and norms for behavior. Done well, it's palpable when present - so consistent, you find yourself immersed in it each day. StickerGiant didn’t establish its culture - it was defined by the people we call our “Giants”. Last fall, we ran an in-depth exploratory (with 80% of Giants participating) to define three business “value” statements we’d used for some time. The exercise revealed what exists beyond aspiration or some vague ideal; our Values were defined by our Giants’ lived experience - how they opt to express and spark them to life daily (to note, our final summary document captures their ideas through 111 direct quotes). Through their support, we understand what these nice phrases mean at the individual contributor level, and our leadership leverages these refined Values, real and true, to guide the business and inform a way forward that’s uniquely StickerGiant.
The clarity has lent texture to how we do business, which decisions are made, and where our culture shows up. Values are an active part of seemingly standard business processes - like when we screen candidates for hire, set relationship expectations with vendors, coach performance, and support Giants via 1:1 check-ins. Our business structures also invoke these Values, through the intentional design of meetings to support message cascades, proactive learning & process improvement extracted from retrospectives, weekly all-company Huddles to facilitate cross-team alignment, how we publicly recognize the efforts of others in Tuesday Appreciations, purposefully celebrate the good through traditions like Halloween and Founder Lunches, and more. Even in this COVID-19 moment, our Values have helped guide our style of decision making, directly informing what we prioritize in our response strategy (like transparent and proactive communication with staff, keeping 100% of our people employed, and proactive coronavirus-specific policies to support “happy & healthy Giants”).
With the voices of Giants intentionally woven into our Values, we’ve found the texture they lent invaluable in driving the shape StickerGiant takes, daily helping in defining #HowWeGiant. All In, Grow & Learn, and Positive Energy will continue to purposefully inform what we do and how we opt to do it, our way. We’re excited for where we go from here together - always, in all ways, one team of Giants.