What an Awesome Culture Looks Like at Searchspring

The culture at Searchspring is something that I focus a lot of time on, it is the basis for the service we provide to our customers and what makes us special.

We have a very simple mission, “Give Merchandisers Superpowers,” and we take this very seriously by backing it up with very clear values.

Here is a quick run through how we create such awesomeness:

• Customers first: Start by thinking about how you are helping the customer today and the rest will follow.
• Open by default: Transparency wherever possible builds trust, trust makes teams work better. Needless privacy prevents collaboration.
• Take time to be curious: Learning allows you to grow, self growth fuels us all.
• Treat everyone with respect: Embrace individualization of each other as well as everyone’s opinions and ideas.
• Fail fast and publicly: Always try new things and iterate, no one is perfect, make mistakes and share them. Mistakes we have learned from are mistakes worth making.
• Do it now: Don’t make everything a project, get answers for your customers now whenever possible. (Your customer is everyone that needs something from you.)

For those that were with us over the holidays, we had some issues but we stood by our values. We put the customer first and communicated as quickly as possible and very often. We were very open and transparent about the issue and we failed publicly, sharing exactly what happened. We live these values internally and externally.

Creating culture takes time, a lot of time. It requires that you first define it and then you seek out employees that exhibit what you want. From there, it is about the hiring process and ensuring that you have a proper culture interview that involves those employees that exhibit your values on the interview panel. What is great is that people want to work with people like them.

Obviously there are dangers to having a set of identical thinking people, which is why the cultural interview is just one of four or five steps in our interview process. You don’t want to hire ‘friends’, you want to hire skilled people who will embody your values and beliefs. I wrote about our hiring process here and I always love talking about this subject.

If you have encountered employees that are exhibiting our values, feel free to reach out to me directly. I’d love to hear how they embodied them.