Whereby
IN A NUTSHELL
Whereby is a video calling platform that believes in people more than tech. I helped write their company values and translated them into a neat explanatory tool. Even better, the values spelled out ETHOS.
Fuller Story
Most companies have similar sounding values. Usually words like transparency, bravery and collaboration. The problem is that heavily used words are invisible and therefore ineffective.
It’s easy to write values that are true. It’s hard to also make them distinctive, meaningful and inspiring - to positively affect behaviour. Ideally you want to hit the bullseye in this Venn diagram:
This is easier said than done. It requires going deeper to look for the belief system that underpins the values. That’s what I did with Whereby and what I discovered was genuinely, surprisingly inspiring.
Whereby has a refreshing, rare culture. They put absolute trust in their people. They let them decide where and when they do their work. But this isn’t virtue flexing, it’s authentic and purposeful.
KEY FINDING
The leadership team believe that giving their people autonomy and freedom is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. Understanding this changed the nature of the project.
As I collected and crafted the values that made up Whereby’s culture, it became clear that each value was connected to the next. It wasn’t a list, it was a flywheel of self-reinforcing tenets:
The Whereby Way
Creating this flywheel made it clear to the entire business that these values weren’t a superficial add-on; they were foundational to how the company works and, importantly, why it works this way.
You’ll notice a logical flow around the wheel. If we’re Human First then of course we would want to embrace a diverse pool of talent. To benefit from them we need to give them our absolute trust. And so on.
Here are the five values in full:
““I love that we are making these concrete and also explaining what each value does not mean. That helps so much in reducing ambiguity.””
“Ethically Ambitious” was actually an existing phrase at Whereby. We loved the curiosity it sparked and used it as inspiration for the other four values. We wanted each one to sound like an interesting ice breaker.
“Selfishly Diverse” was a deliberately provocative phrase to sidestep shallow-sounding clichés. “Outgrit” is a fabricated word whose novelty suited the message. And “Trust trust” was, frankly, a wordsmith’s dream.
Mission & Vision
On the back of the values work, I worked with the team to craft their mission and vision statements. ‘A world in which anywhere works’ evoked their optimism and trust in people perfectly.
““Andy helped us navigate the challenges of evolving our existing Vision and Mission with deftness, pragmatism, and good humour. A consummate wrangler of wayward executives, he helped us get aligned and excited about a way forward quickly and effectively, leaving us with something we can proudly rally our team around.””
Final thought
I’m not usually keen on turning values into acronyms. It can feel contrived. But these values were one letter away from spelling ETHOS by accident. It was too tempting, so we edited. I won’t lie, it felt good.