Casai: The Values That Drive Us

Thousands of guests hosted, tens of thousands of nights stayed, hundreds of employees hired, and a global pandemic later, Casai is a totally different company than the one my co-founder Maricarmen and I envisioned a year ago. When we first drew up our company values, it felt like a theoretical exercise. What did we hope the company would be? What aspects of our own value systems did we want our team to prioritize? What parts of our old companies did we want to import? 

Fast forward to today, and our culture is not at all theoretical. Hundreds of micro and macro decisions are made every day. And what are values if not a set of criteria teammates use to make decisions (consciously or not)?

So we embarked on an exercise that at times waxed philosophical to determine “what is Casai?” We did this in three parts. 

First, we benchmarked companies and studied the latest OD psychology to see how we could create an extremely high performing culture that was also supportive of our teammates’ goals. We read: 

• What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
• The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
• Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock
• High Output Management by Andy Grove
• Setting the Table by Danny Meyer
• And more, but those are the ones I would recommend every entrepreneur to read

Second, we surveyed the team and held many hours of interviews across >10 functions. As we built the survey, we tested behaviors along the axes defined in The Culture Factor. We presented scenarios to the team with two possible responses and went through several iterations to ensure that there was no clear right answer. We wanted to understand how aligned decision-making was, and how this differed among teammates that had been at Casai for 1 day vs 1 year. Here are a couple of examples:

When you have to make a decision on a new amenities kit proposal, what do you optimize for?

1. User experience, even if it worsens unit economics
2. Unit economics, even if it damages the guest experience

A guest makes a request never made before. Do you:

1. Quickly resolve the request and check with the teams afterwards how to establish a future process for those types of requests
2. Put the request on temporary hold so you can get the right approvals, even if that means not being able to support the guest immediately

As you can tell, these are challenging because there's no obvious right answer.

Yet we were pleasantly surprised to learn that the team was very aligned in responses for almost every decision and that those decisions were almost universally what we founders would have chosen! Just so you know, my answers are 1 (sorry investors ??) and 1.

Finally, we combined the learnings from the theoretical benchmarks with the actual surveyed behaviors and made adjustments to our pre-existing values. We also decided that each of the five values would have five associated behaviors to make crystal clear the intent behind the value. So with that context, I’m excited to present our new values!

Casai Values

Love our guests by creating unforgettable experiences.

• We only exist because of guests, so treat them like royalty.
• Getting to 5 stars is a collective effort and everyone’s individual responsibility.
• When it comes to anticipating our guests’ needs, ask for forgiveness, not consent.
• “No” should never be the final solution.
• Create meaningful connections with guests. Guests, not customers!

Trust the team and lose the ego.

• Love our team as much as we love our guests. Trust others to do the right thing.
• Highlight wins, and show gratitude.
• There’s always another side. If you have questions or concerns, be transparent, and ask your teammate directly.
• Feedback is a gift, so seek it constantly.
• Roll up your sleeves; no job is beneath anyone or outside anyone’s scope.

Enjoy solving problems.

• Casai is a marathon. Enjoy the journey.
• Many challenges will arise daily, so prioritize ruthlessly and communicate.
• Instead of getting frustrated, take control, and solve problems.
• Be proactive, raise your hand, and propose solutions.
• Go the extra mile to deliver excellence.

Experiment and celebrate trying.

• Encourage creativity, and always question the status quo.
• Prioritize agility over agonizing over a wrong decision. The vast majority of wrong decisions can be corrected.
• Accept failure as part of the journey. Pick yourself back up, learn fast, and move on.
• Debate with data and facts, not opinions. 
• Always pursue knowledge. Self-improvement is a constant exercise.

Leave the world a better place than we found it.

• It’s not enough to avoid doing bad; we should actively do good. 
• Have a bias toward sustainability.
• Be open-minded, and actively seek diverse teammates and opinions.
• Actively call out injustice.
• Play the long-term game.

Ideation is the easy part; implementation is the hard part

But, candidly, coming up with the values was the easy part. Every company can put corporate platitudes on the wall. Less obvious is how to live them. In order to put actions behind our words, we’re implementing “quick wins” and then embarking on another strategic exercise of embedding these into our people practices. 

The quick wins include: 

• Choosing a “guest story of the week” each Friday by highlighting a teammate that went above and beyond in service to a guest.
• In a practice we learned from the Navy SEALs and Pixar, we’re going to normalize post-mortem meetings for every project to openly debrief and give collective feedback.
• In a practice we learned from Google, we’re going to implement a “Bureaucracy Buster” survey where teammates can volunteer procedures or policies they view overly onerous.
• We’re starting a sustainability committee and a diversity committee of volunteers to drive action for our fifth value.
• Weekly 5-question surveys designed to measure workplace satisfaction and engagement.
• We created icons for each value (as seen above!), then made them Slack emojis, so we could highlight behavior that exemplified a value.

And every Friday, teammates post in two channels: 

• the #obrigracias channel, where each person gives a Casai Credit, which is a shout-out for above-and-beyond work, directly relating to our values. This is a tradition taken from my old company, Nova Credit, which taught me the importance of a simple, weekly act of gratitude.
• the #fuck-up-friday channel, where each person shares a personal story of a fuck-up they had that week, followed by a GIF! Psychological safety is a huge aspect of what allows us to push boundaries, so we have to find ways to create that.

People Practices

We’re revamping all of our hiring, performance evaluations, and promotion criteria so they are more aligned to the values. While we can’t expect all teammates to spike on all values, we do want to build an organization of spikey individuals and a well-balanced team (and no assholes!). We are beginning to build a team similar to Google’s People Innovation Lab to augment our existing People & Culture team’s capabilities with data science and PhD-level rigor. 

As you can tell, our team is one that is distinctive: guest- and team-obsessed, egoless, proactive, data-driven, and, above all, committed to making the world a better place. We have benefitted immensely from studying (and experiencing!) organizations we truly respect and can only hope to combine the best of all of them and join their ranks.