The heart of success: TheyDo’s journey to craft and live its core values

Matt Moralo Langan, TheyDo's Head of People, shares the story of how we revitalized our core values to unlock success.

Values are the cornerstone of every successful company. They’re a set of core beliefs that act as a compass, guiding us in making the right decisions, both individually and collectively. However, company values are often established through a top-down approach, shaped by the vision of leadership and then integrated into the fabric of the organization. 

At TheyDo, we believe there’s a better way⁠—one that fosters inclusivity, unity, and genuine commitment. Here’s how an inclusive experience can not only define and refine a company’s values, but also ensure that each and every member of an organization wholeheartedly embraces and carries them forward.

I joined TheyDo as Head of People in January 2023, a very exciting time of growth for the company. TheyDo had just wrapped up an incredibly successful year in 2022, growing revenue by more than 500%, year on year. Equally impressive, they’d just announced a €12 million 'Series A' funding round.

That said, one thing was noticeably missing—collective belief in our four company values: collaboration, transparency, ingenuity, and confidence. Rarely spoken about amongst team members, it was clear that our existing values lacked the power to inspire. Drawing from my own professional experience in companies such as Personio, Airbnb and Atlassian where values were truly cherished, it was clear that nurturing a company’s values is a key ingredient for success. With this in mind, we determined that revisiting TheyDo’s values was not only possible but also imperative. 

Beginning to explore

In Spring of this year, our small but mighty startup (33 team members, at the time) had the opportunity to spend a week together in the Netherlands. This was an ideal time to ascertain whether our values were fit for purpose, and to explore the potential of crafting new values that truly resonated. It was fundamental that every team member had the opportunity to participate. 

We split the team into two distinct groups (A and B), creating a more intimate gathering to foster in-depth conversations and reduce the influence of conformity bias. To minimize anchoring, we curated each group to include a mix of individual contributors, people leaders and Co-Founders. Each session lasted two hours and was run in the same format for both groups.

Initially, we asked each group to describe TheyDo in three words, rank our existing values from 1-4, and highlight their most and least favored values (and explain why). We also asked each team member to share a value from a previous employer or another company (excluding TheyDo) that personally resonated with them.

We then broke the group into smaller sub-groups of 4-5 people. These groups were tasked with collaboratively generating five practical, forward-looking values that would project us toward further success. Each sub-group presented their proposed values and rationale back to the larger group. We then employed a dot voting system to allow team members to choose their favorites (up to three votes per person). 

What we learned

• When we asked team members to describe TheyDo in three words, the words team, journey and customers emerged most frequently. Both groups were dissatisfied with how the existing values were named. When it came to ranking them, collaboration and transparency came out on top. Interestingly though, collaboration and confidence tied at the bottom. Some individuals felt that collaboration was inherent. Counter arguments suggested that it was justified, as people or team-related conflicts often stem from a lack of collaboration.

• When we looked beyond TheyDo, the examples of company values that resonated with our team members shared a common trait: they were actionable.

• Group A’s most frequently suggested values were (in order); customer obsession, feedback culture, empathetic, impact and quality. Meanwhile, Group B’s preferred values were (in order); fail fast/succeed sooner, cloaks off, own the journey, lead by example, and exotherm. Wondering what we mean by exotherm? Essentially, it's a release of energy that can propel positive energy forward, collectively. Another way of thinking about this would be to get things done, together!

• Six key themes emerged from dissecting these values; team work, customer centricity, transparency, being able to challenge one another, ownership and being able to learn from our own mistakes.
  

Crafting a more inspired path

Alongside our Co-Founders, our objective was to create a set of new, action-led values that would inspire. Here are the four we came up with and the rationale behind each one.

1. Journey Together: This felt like a natural choice. After all, TheyDo is all about Journey Management. It spoke to achieving a common goal together, collaboration, assuming good intent, and offering ongoing support to one another. Key theme: team work.

2. Own It: As a start-up, we’re all responsible for acting like a Co-Founder. This value spoke to having confidence, ingenuity, delivering on our commitments, and course-correcting when necessary. Key themes: ownership and being able to learn from our own mistakes.

3. Cloaks Off: Created in our values workshop, this is a bold play on words with a double meaning; transparency (wherever possible) across the entire company, regardless of level and ‘say what you mean, mean what you say’. It's important to underscore the 'how'—be empathetic. Key themes: transparency and being able to challenge one another.

4. Customer Fueled: TheyDo lives for its customers. Our mission is to turn customer insights into better customer opportunities. Thus, including a customer-related value amplifies the significance we place on valuing our customers, be they internal or external. Key theme: customer-centricity.

It’s noteworthy that our original four values naturally found their place in our new ones. While not our initial intent, it was a welcome realization to recognize that each of them held merit, albeit as integral parts of broader, more character-rich values.

Living our new values

Creating our new values was just the initial step of a significantly larger journey in which our values are ingrained in our culture and way of working. We instituted a few processes to ensure that this happens.

• We believe that our values should resonate and align with our candidates (aka potential future team members). We created a values interview as part of our hiring process, which includes situational questions. Our values interviewers, handpicked by our Co-Founders, underwent a special values interview training to facilitate this process.

• We have a kudos channel on Slack where every team member can give a shout out to another team member, linking their actions to one or more of our values.

• Twice a month, team members can give a live kudos in our all hands meetings, again linking their actions to one or more of our values.

• Our bi-annual performance review cycle includes our values so that every team member has the opportunity to be celebrated for embodying our values.

Celebrating the journey

I'd like to give a big shout out and share my gratitude to everyone at TheyDo who took part in creating our new values. And to Martina Ruiß, my former manager/mentor and friend for her guidance in this process.

If you're considering creating company values, or simply would like to revisit your existing ones, I hope the above will serve as a meaningful starting point.

And last but by no means least, we're hiring! If you would like to know more about us and our open roles, check out theydo.com/careers.