Culture and Values at RevoU

With? RevoU ?having surpassed this year 150 employees (ie.?Dunbar’s number), we recently decided to better articulate our company culture and make it more explicit, for both our current and future employees.

Such process was not about engineering overnight our values from the ground up but rather a process of synthesis of the existing implicit RevoU culture, which is the result of the day-to-day behaviors, decisions and trade-offs made by the people that have been working in the company since its inception.

Our main goal in deciding to make our culture more explicit was to find a more scalable way to talk about it, and in particular to help us across the following dimensions:

• supporting our hiring decisions: past a size where the earliest employees and the founder were able to interview every single new joiner to assess the cultural fit, we needed to find a more scalable way to convey to every hiring manager whom we should hire and whom not
• accelerating the onboarding of new employees: a more explicit culture helps new joiners to have a clear idea from the get-go on how we treat each other, which behaviours we consider acceptable and which not and increase their chances of succeeding within our organisation
• providing a better framework to make decisions when trade-offs are involved: culture is typically tested (and reinforced) when trade-offs are involved. How do we answer to questions such as whether it is OK to avoid having hard conversations to not hurt someone’s feelings and the team’s “harmony”? Or whether we should prioritise speed in hiring vs quality? How we deal with such trade-offs is part of defining and living our culture
• keeping ourselves accountable to walk the walk and pushing us to get better:?our values shouldn’t just reflect who we are today (or have been in the past), but also who we aspire to be(come). Our goal should be to try to get closer to such ideals, knowing that we won’t be able to live up to them in 100% of the circumstances (and that’s OK)

On top of the reasons above, building and maintaining a strong company culture is for us an even more important goal than for most other companies, given the type of industry we are in (Education).

Human interaction is at the core of what we offer to our customers (our students) and our internal employees’ culture profoundly shapes the behaviour and interactions we have with our students. Such interactions directly impact how our students learn, how they are treated and the type of support we provide to them.

Lastly, on a more personal level, building and scaling an organisation with a culture to be proud of, one that enables people to do their best and most fulfilling work, has been and remains for me as a founder as important as a goal than any business milestones we are seeking to achieve.

As?Ben Horowitz best put it, building a great place to work is an end in itself.

Below is our?Culture doc, which you can also find at:?revou.co/culture

If you feel inspired by it, if our values match your aspirations of the ideal workplace and if you think this is the environment that would allow you to do the best work of your life, come help us in transforming the state of Higher Education in Southeast Asia and give millions of people access to better career opportunities.

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RevoU Culture document

I) Kindness

Empathy

We always try to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Be it our team member, our direct report, or our manager.

We act with compassion and think about the consequences of our behaviour on the other person, regardless of the hierarchical relationship.

We are empathetic with our colleagues but also, and especially with our most important stakeholder: our students.

We understand how much anxiety comes with starting or changing a career and in particular in looking for a new job. We never take this for granted, and try to support our students as much as we can not only in equipping them with the most effective technical skills but in providing them with all the psychological support they need.

Respect

We treat people with the same respect regardless of their seniority and role in the company. We are as kind with our older teammates as we are with the new intern who just started last Monday.

We respect each and every one of our students as if our overall business depended on that very one student. No matter how many thousands and millions of professional lives we are able to touch, we never forget that behind such aggregate numbers are unique people and life stories..

Selflessness

Despite being extremely driven and ambitious about our own career, we are leaving your ego at RevoU’s entrance door.

We make time to help our colleagues, even if it doesn’t directly benefit us (or our team).

We are lifting everyone around us as we genuinely want them to succeed.

We believe that career progression at RevoU is not a zero-sum game: helping each other will benefit everyone’s career.

We are aware that our drive and selflessness put us at risk of forgetting about our own well-being and we are not afraid to take a step back when necessary, balancing the intensity of our day-to-day work with periods of deserved rest.

II) Candor

Authenticity

We are transparent and authentic with each other across all levels:

• Horizontally, among team members and across teams
• Downward, from manager to direct report
• Upward, from direct report to manager

We are challenging cultural habits of keeping things for ourselves and giving hierarchies too much importance.

We are aware that trying to be political will hurt our career rather than help us, and we only say things about other employees that we would tell them to their face

Feedback Seeking

We seek and give feedback often.

We look at feedback as the best tool to grow our careers and succeed as an organization.

Knowing that we deeply and genuinely care for each other and for each other’s careers, allows us to be much more direct in our feedback than social norms typically allow for, without the risk of hurting each other.

Outspoken

We are not afraid of saying what we think, every time we think is in the best interest of the company, even if it’s uncomfortable.

Especially when it’s uncomfortable.

We try to share information as freely as possible across the organization, as we believe that being?open by default?benefits everyone’s decision making.

We give hierarchy much lower importance than in other organizations and society at large, and favour depth of thinking, supported by empirical evidence, versus seniority.

We expect our best junior employees to be able to challenge our senior management often.

We don’t expect everyone to agree all the time with everyone.

Decisions need to be taken though, and when in disagreement, we don’t fear expressing our disagreement?while wholeheartedly committing to it.?Executing at the best of our capabilities for the best interest of the company.

Failing safely

We know that being outspoken and bold in our thinking might result in us being wrong many times. We don’t fear it as we embrace the act of making mistakes openly, admitting them, and moving on. This is how we learn as a team and come up with the best possible courses of action — not as one (senior) individual, but as a team that shares (maybe unconventional) ideas with each other which will eventually evolve together into the?best possible course of action.

III) Highest standards

“Around here we try to be proud of every little piece of work we do”?— Walt Disney

Most great companies expect high standards and excellence when it comes to the end product or services offered to their customers. Some others push the concept further by expecting to delight with every customer-facing interaction.

At RevoU, we hold ourselves to the highest standards — taking the concept of high standards outwards to our customers, and inwards to everything we do every day.

Upholding the highest standards allows us to grow at all times. To become a better version of ourselves and make people around us better as well. It makes sure we deliver the highest quality experiences for our students to guide them through their life-changing journey with us.

Therefore, we expect everyone to develop and maintain a culture of high standards.

First and foremost with regards to your own personal work.

Then to the work of your team members.

Finally to the work of your peers and anyone you interact with in the company.

“A culture of high standards is protective of all the “invisible” but crucial work that goes on in every company. I’m talking about the work that no one sees. The work that gets done when no one is watching. In a high standards culture, doing that work well is its own reward — it’s part of what it means to be a professional.” — Jeff Bezos

As we develop the highest standards for our own work, we also expect it from our peers, our direct reports and everyone we interact with.

There are few things more rewarding than to perform at our peak with other exceptional performers around us towards a common goal and vision.

Once you’ve tasted high standards, there is no going back.

Always a student

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious” — A. Einstein

We are never satisfied with the status quo and any success obtained so far. We strive to always improve and do better.

We fight complacency by being healthily paranoid about the success we achieved so far and are aware of the challenges the future will hold. We know that there is so much more we can do and we always dream bigger. We know we are in a unique position to really make a difference in this world and know that it is a rare privilege to be in that position. We have to give it our best shot — every day.

‘Always a student’ mentality does not only apply to RevoU as a company. It applies to each of us as individuals.

We actively manage our personal growth. We embrace curiosity as lifelong learners who believe that the moment we stop learning, we start becoming irrelevant.

We are seeking to learn something new every day, as we try to go to bed every night a bit better than when we woke up.

It doesn’t matter how smart we are today. For what we want to achieve, we need to continue growing ourselves just as fast as RevoU.

We believe that our relentless drive to learn something new every day, combined with our long term thinking, will make us outperform every other company over the long run.

We don’t rely just on talent or having the ‘smartest’ people. We have the?grit?and dedication to show up every day and do what’s necessary to rise up to the challenge of today — of Day 1.

Hiring

Our culture of high standards starts with our approach to hiring:

“At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company. If we are better able to select up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired” — Laszlo Bock, (former) VP of People Operations at Google

We believe that finding, recruiting, and developing top talent is the single most important factor that will determine our success in the years to come.

It doesn’t matter how junior or ‘simple’ a job is, every new hire should raise the average talent bar of a team, function and company at large.

As managers, we are not afraid of hiring people more talented than us, but we instead embrace the opportunity to do so.

We invest more in our hiring process than other companies and make hiring everyone’s responsibility. We are always on the lookout for the next exceptional team member to join our journey.

People Development

“Training is the manager’s job. Training is the highest leverage activity a manager can do to increase the output of an organization.”- Andrew S. Grove

Coherently with our “Always a student” mentality, we go the extra mile as a company to invest in the growth of our own employees.

Both directly via specific training, and indirectly by means of our managers.

For the former, we expect our most senior employees (starting with our leadership team), to invest a substantial amount of their time in providing direct training to the organisation.

For the latter, we value more than most companies “managerial excellence”.

Managers are the primary responsible of the career growth of our employees and as a result of that, they play a pivotal role in our employee performance, retention and overall happiness.

We ask our employees, from our very junior ones all the way to the top, to hold their own managers to the highest standards and to not be afraid of speak up when such standards are not being met.

Performance management

We make kindness and empathy co-exist with a strong performance driven approach to work.

For as much as the depth of care for each other could be often equated to a family type of relationship, we prefer to describe our personal bonds by using the analogy of a professional sports team. Professional athletes that work together as a team for a bigger goal

We want everyone around us to be amazing in their role to enable us to push forwards toward our common vision and purpose.

We earn each other respect by being as effective as possible in our role.

As individual contributors, managers and leaders.

If caring for each other is a necessary condition to thrive at RevoU, it is not sufficient.

Being outstanding at your role is.

We believe every person can be great at something in this world.

If someone is not able to be great at RevoU, we believe they should not waste their time failing here, but go on and excel somewhere else where the conditions fit with their potential & aspirations.

We have big aspirations and maintain the highest standard in everything we do. We will provide support, guidance, training, and ample opportunity to anyone who we hire. That said, we have low tolerance for areas of low performance and we understand it’s our duty towards the company, each other, and ultimately the students we serve, to sometimes make the difficult but necessary decision to part ways with someone who will not be able to succeed with RevoU and let them find the place where they will.

Celebrate success

We are also aware that our strive to always improve, do better and fight complacency, puts us at risk of taking any success for granted.

We vow to remind ourselves at every important milestone to celebrate how far we have come, be grateful for the opportunity, and be proud of all the efforts and challenges that we have overcome together to get where we are today to continue our journey into an exciting tomorrow.

IV) Passion

We have a different and much larger approach than most companies when it comes to being “customer centric”. We call it Passion.

We believe in the importance and the beauty of passion in work life.

We are passionate about life in general and work as a subset of it.

We want to do work that matters. Work that has a real, quantifiable impact on the lives of people around us and on society at large.

We see work as a fundamental part of life, not something to separate from it or to “balance” with.

We find it sad to talk to friends who are dreading Sunday evenings. We try to convince them to change jobs, telling them that there must be a better way to spend the majority of their waking hours.

If we ever find ourselves in such a position, we bring it up to our manager to solve the root causes of it as fast as possible. Or part ways to seek more fulfilling work outside of RevoU.

Passion is contagious, as is the lack thereof.

We get excited, we celebrate, we laugh a lot and sometimes we cry. We believe this is the best way to live a professional life to its fullest.

We are the opposite of boring.

But what are we passionate about precisely?

Our students, first and foremost.

We do everything we can to make them succeed.

Even if that means doing something that doesn‘t bring any profit to the company in the short term. And even if it doesn’t bring profit over the longer term.

We believe that doing the?right?thing for our students should be prioritized over short-term business gains.

We believe that running a profitable business is the best way to maximize the impact we can have on society at large and that building long term trust with our students, by trading off short term commercial gains, is the most strategic way for us to maximize such impact.

…And we are passionate about life at large.

Many of us have families & kids to look after.

Some of us have side projects.

With many of us, we will split paths and we will support them in starting their own businesses.

Whatever our life focus outside of RevoU, we always try to do it with Passion.