What got you here, won’t get you there
A venture into our guiding principles
In the same way sharks must remain in motion in water, in tech, you must keep iterating or you die. The journey really lies in improving, tweaking, assessing, upgrading, scrapping, rewriting, editing, rearranging, recycling, borrowing (stealing?) and definitely questioning. Below, I share with you the wanderings of three aspects of Smarkets that have evolved along with us over the last decade.
First, it being the start of the year, I am sure you are itching to book your next escapade and have something to look forward to. Who isn’t? So how do unlimited holidays sound? Pretty great, probably. Having come from a very formal banking upbringing where terms like unlimited, free, and on the house are severely lacking, the idea of having unlimited holiday appears, at first glance, extremely appealing. But we have found that this is not the case.
When we gave unlimited holidays to employees, two things happened. On the one hand, our hardest working people took almost no holiday, ending in burnout. In fact, we had to push them to catch up towards the end of the year. On the other hand, there were the classic abusers who booked a month off leaving their teams picking up the slack. It created confusion, animosity and resentment — even though we asked teams to give each other feedback and self regulate. This is why we recently revamped the policy to make it clearer and more straightforward, yet more prescriptive.
Second, self-management has been a term that we have had to redefine over time. When I first joined the company and we were just shy of 25 people, self-management was organic. There was no need for structure or layers, and communication was seamless. Fast forward to 100+ people and suddenly this purist approach to self-management could not exist. Critical information was being lost/missed, responsibility was everyone’s so it was no one’s, which meant that accountability and output suffered.
How did we combat this? We came up with the ‘Smarkets Way’. We took what we loved about self-management and moulded it into what worked for us. We let teams remain autonomous but created two extra layers in the form of our Team Leads and Leadership Team, so that information could flow nicely upwards as well as downwards. And importantly, ownership was better defined. Today, teams still decide how to organise themselves and employees still champion projects they are passionate about, providing they add value to the business goals or work culture.
This brings us nicely to the third project we have been working on: our company values. At the turn of the decade, our aim was to reinforce the guiding principles that help employees better understand the work culture. Through a series of workshops, we settled on four values that we felt had stood the test of time and were representative of who we were as a company.
When you evolve as an organisation over more than 10 years, and your workforce is a puzzle of people with disparate tenures, it can be a big ask to align everyone around the same values. This was a refreshing and necessary exercise that helped us solidify what we stand for. The Smarkets values as confirmed by our employees are: Openness, Ownership, Innovation and Nurture. For more insight on each, please see the graphic below.
So in the end, like death and taxes, the third constant we always acknowledge is indeed change. At Smarkets, we welcome change, we embrace it, we celebrate it. Rapid iteration is the norm and challenging the status quo is part of our DNA. We want to push the envelope and disrupt the current state of affairs. Because we know, from startup to scale up, from David to Goliath, from archaic to innovative, what got you here won’t get you there. And above all, you can’t become what you want by remaining where you are.
