The Prowareness Culture – Energy & Craziness

Prowareness is a coaching & consultancy firm with distributed Agile teams located in India. We help organizations transform into software-driven responsive enterprises. In the past few years Prowareness has been growing rapidly. To enable and harness this growth Prowareness uses the “cell philosophy”. When a team (cell) reaches a certain size, it’s divided into two. This ensures the separate teams preserve a maintainable size and further growth is stimulated.

Prowareness has formed its culture along the way and it appears to be a culture with lots of differences compared to traditional organizations. People that enter our office feel this culture right away and are sometimes surprised and intrigued by our approach.

The Prowareness culture is based on 7 values:

• Teamwork
• Continuous learning
• Commitment
• Openness and transparency
• Energy & craziness
• Ambition
• Integrity

Undoubtedly, Prowareness is the most Agile company in the Netherlands. Yes, this is a bold statement. A statement that asks for a more detailed description. Therefore we will write a series of blog posts about our culture. Hereby culture is considered a result of the present mindset, behavior and skills. The areas by which a culture can be influenced are symbols, power structures, organizational structure, control systems, rituals and stories. We will describe the supporting activities and practices Prowareness uses to foster the values.

This blog post will be about the cultural value ‘Energy & Craziness’.

Cultural Value – Energy & craziness

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, goes the familiar English proverb. At Prowareness we are very fond of working hard. Yet dullness is something you will not find in our way of working. We keep that dreadful dullness at bay by injecting our working routine with the necessary parties, celebrations and other spontaneous actions. We feel that “Energetic work and crazy play makes Prowareness an exciting company”.

In case you are reading this Jack, keep on reading. After this article you’ll know just what to do to stop being that dull guy without losing your work ethic.

Practices

Yoga

At Prowareness we find it very important to have a healthy balance. Not only in balance in work and play, but also balance in body and mind. A healthy balance generates positive energy. We want Propassionals to radiate that good and positive energy. Therefore Propassionals have the opportunity to discover their own healthy balance by attending Yoga classes. Every Tuesday night after Team Time, Propassionals are taught to maximize the ROI of their own ‘bodily-powerplants’ by a professional Yoga instructor.

Cheer

We believe that nothing could start your day better than assembling your team and cheer all together. At Prowareness, each day is greeted by Propassionals with our company cheer. Cheering provides the necessary mental fuel to ignite our passion and positive mindset to be able to help our customers to the best of our abilities. Our company cheer is a subtle yet important ritual that improves not only team spirit, but also amplifies the energy on a company-wide scale. We on!

Celebration-moment

Contrary to Jack’s work ethic, we are strong supporters of the ‘Work hard, Play hard’ mantra. We believe that Great Players always enjoy their game and celebrate their success. The act of celebrating success and milestone-achievements at regular interval serves as a dynamo to Prowareness, generating energy. Energy which is greatly utilized by Propassionals to turn future opportunities into success, which in term will be celebrated again. Since we have a consistent and high frequent rate of success, we’ve adopted the Celebration-moment practice; during Tuesday Team Time, we schedule 45 minutes to gather in an informal manner and raise our champagne glasses to new Propassionals joining the family, or we congratulate fellow Propassionals who made promotion.

“It only happens at Prowareness”

With respect to our competitors, we notice that Prowareness does things a little differently: we shape the craziness part of our culture value in favor to the element of surprise. Our tribe leader and CEO cleverly captured the essence of this value by coining the practice “It only happens at Prowareness”.

So what exactly does only happen at Prowareness? What’s so different about us that sets us apart from other companies? Well, allow me to state some questions to explore this difference. Have you ever been woken on a Sunday morning by the doorbell and receive a royal breakfast to kickstart your day? Have you ever walked into your office only to be surprised that plenary meetings are cancelled and replaced by a cocktail workshop? Have you ever worked for an organization where the CEO himself secretly prepared a barbecue party for more than a hundred employees in his own backyard? You probably answered no to these questions did you? Don’t worry, we won’t hold it against you. These questions only scratch the surface of a plethora of crazy surprises taking place at Prowareness, you won’t find elsewhere in our opinion. That’s why ‘It only happens at Prowareness.’

Events

Propassionals know how to party. Our marketing puts this collective ‘party-knowledge’ to good use in organizing in events that have Craziness written all over them, with a capital C. A prime example of this is our Holi event: an event in honor of the Hindu festival celebrating the victory of good over evil. All Propassionals who attend are supplied with a range of coloring powders. What follows next could be best described as a giant ‘free-for-all powder-fight’ where Propassionals play, chase and color each other with powder.

Other examples of events are Mooovz, a clubbing experience mixing good food, great dance music and street theatre acts. The Crazy Wild party, a carnival-like party where Propassionals go nuts as they dress up as their favorite persona. And of course, our ‘infamous’ Christmas Party, where the most recent edition was dominated by live-fire acts, haute cuisine, ice sculptures, red-carpet catwalk and one very mysterious fortune teller.

Conclusion

Energy & craziness might be our most important cultural value; it is the icing on the cake, profoundly determining our identity and distinguishing factor in market position. Life is too short to work to spend it entirely on work, you’ve got to let the crazy out from time to time.

At Prowareness we believe that having ‘Energy and Craziness’ as a cultural value will bring balance to keep our company healthy, fit and future-proof.

Oh and Jack, please pay us a visit sometime when you’re not working. We would love to teach you a thing or two about spicing up your work by mixing in some energy and craziness.