Deptive’s team’s desire to ‘live well’

The Deptive team’s desire to ‘live well’ – follow us on our journey

By Jason Poyner, CEO, Deptive

A few years ago, before the pandemic changed everyone’s idea of ‘normal’, we embarked on an exercise at Deptive to clarify what our values as a company were.

It wasn’t a very successful undertaking and for that, I lay the blame squarely at my own feet. Together, we came up with lots of great ideas. We all agreed we had a culture that values hard work, honesty, and accountability – we like to get sh*t done!

We wanted to treat ourselves and each other with respect, to show integrity and to strive for excellence in serving our customers. It all sounded great.

We finalised a set of values and set about trying to live by them. But we struck a problem. Within a few months they were largely forgotten, a list of worthy things no one could remember.

What do you value?

It dawned on me that while we’d had a great discussion, the values we settled on were really my vision for Deptive and how we should go about our work. They weren’t necessarily the values that motivated the individuals that make up the Deptive family.

As a passionate founder, I’d owned the process to too great a degree. If we were going to live and work by a series of deeply ingrained principles, they would need to have the genuine buy-in of everyone in the organisation. It was a big lesson for me. Our subsequent attempt at articulating and setting our core values was much more successful, with co-development very much to the fore.

Here’s what they look like:

1. We get sh*t done.
   • We are persistent, determined and driven.
   • Our customers know we will deliver.
2. No excuses.
   • We take ownership and we’re accountable.
   • We don’t pass the buck.
3. Always curious, always evolving.
   • We’re curious about how things work which drives our learning and our evolution.
4. Straight talkers. No BS, no waffle.
   • We tell it like it is.
   • We challenge each other and our customers.
   • Our customers value our experience and our honesty.
5. Live well.
   • Work is not always #1. Everyone has needs outside of Deptive.
   • We make time for family, friends, and ourselves.
   • Life’s too short to be serious all the time.
   • Enjoy what you do, have fun, and laugh out loud.
6. Be the authority. We are the experts.
   • We are the authority that our customers can trust.

Today, we do our best to stick to those values. Doing so can be hard work. But that’s because they meansomething. We don’t pay lip service to them. We are a happier and more productive company for having these values. Our quarterly Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), a metric used to measure employee engagement, is consistently high.

Our “live well” value is well embedded, but with the impact to our lives during the COVID lockdowns, we realised just how important this value is. We all agree that as members of the Deptive family, we want to do better, we asked ourselves how we can really bring to life our “live well” value.

What does that mean?

Right question, right time

In the last couple of years, we have acknowledged and celebrated the moments when members of our team have faced challenges in their lives or striven to help others. One of our colleagues, Tony, took some time away from work to support a friend who had experienced a personal tragedy.

Gareth, who is ex-Air Force, did the Mental Health Foundations 25 push-ups for 25 Days Challenge. Ankit still had a smile on his face and such a amazing outlook on life after arriving in the country by himself, leaving his friends and family behind.

We recognised and acknowledged these things because it felt like the right thing to do. Work is not always #1. But now we are setting out to decide on what living well really means to us. It could have major implications for the company, potentially changing how we measure success, invest in people, and set our goals for the future.

But now is the time to answer this question. The pandemic has forced all of us to think about what is important in life. It has changed how billions of people live and work, and many of those changes will be permanent.

What it means to ‘live well.’

Every day at Deptive, we are helping customers who are adapting to the new normal. Our end-to-end digital workspace services let organisations and employees securely do their work with all the required applications and data, wherever they need or want to be. We believe this is making it easier for people to live the lives they want. Our own efforts at Deptive to live well could better inform those efforts.

So, join us on our journey as we explore what living well means. In a series of posts, we’ll keep you updated on how we define this important value, how we go about living up to it, how we measure our progress and what we learn along the way.

It won’t be straightforward; the reality will likely fail to perfectly match our ideals. But we think this is important. We are committed to allowing every one of us to live well.

Read more about our journey and what it means to the team in our ongoing journey to live well and deptive is good for my soul.