The Impact of Clearly Defined Work Culture and Principles

Most companies start with a mission statement, but not everyone thinks through their core culture in a formal way, especially not to the level that Amazon is famous for. I believe culture and #EmployeeExperience are extremely important, but the idea of writing out your beliefs and drilling them into every employee, especially as an acronym to be printed on badges, walls, swag, etc felt more than gimmicky even if it would have some positive impact.

Here at Qualtrics, we live by TACOS: Transparency, All In, Customer Obsessed, One Team, Scrappy. In this past year, I learned that yes it is a bit gimmicky but it really does influence how every person, myself included, operates. Before diving too deep, let's explain what TACOS means to Qualtrics.

TRANSPARENT

Our default is to share, leading to open debate, trust, and decisions based on data, not politics.

ALL IN

We bet on Qualtrics and Qualtrics bets on us. This is our company. We deliver whatever it takes.

CUSTOMER OBSESSED

If a customer is upset, we failed. Period. We learn, and we fix it.

ONE TEAM

There is only one team at Qualtrics. We win and lose together and never say, "That's not my job."

SCRAPPY

We're smart, resourceful, and find a way. We write our own story instead of following others.

How do clearly defined principles help?

The simple ability to invoke a key phrase to ask your question (“I need more transparency on that”), to get support from colleagues, to remind yourself you're not only empowered but encouraged to go get it done in a "scrappy" way. It takes time, but it becomes a natural way to work and everyone knows what you’re asking of them when you use a key phrase. 

I get it in theory - but what does that really mean?

In a project this week I hit a roadblock. The expert I was working with didn’t have time to build out some of our key sales sequences in Outreach (the primary tool we use with SDRs). Even though I did “my part” of creating the sales enablement assets we were at risk of not moving forward with a key marketing/sales campaign. To be honest, at Microsoft, there is a good chance a roadblock like this would be like rolling a rock uphill - I would have the best intentions to create a workaround but if you didn’t have access to the tool or training, there wasn’t much you could do to get around a bottleneck. Part of this was the company’s size, part of this was my attitude admittedly but ultimately it was the reality.

Today at Qualtrics? Within 48 hours instead, I have a training set up to learn the tool for myself, expanded that training to my other colleagues so we could all get it done and got my positive feedback from my manager who “loves the scrappiness” - invoking one of our principles. 

A roadblock turned into a learning opportunity and time to reflect on a core part of joining Qualtrics in evolving how I approach work. 

 As they say… culture eats strategy for lunch every day.