I am a company values nerd. There, I’ve said it! I can hear eyes rolling from where I sit in my little, awesome home office, but it is true.
At Pop Education, we recently reworked our company values to define who we are now, and what is important to us. It is timely because we are celebrating our 4th birthday this month! A great time to reflect on how far we have come and where we want to be in the future.
Curiously, our values formed the acronym QUIRKIE (ok, that may have been crafted just a smidge). It seemed fitting really. We are a quirky group of people – so why not – and why not buy ourselves an extra value with an ‘IE’ over a plain ‘Y’?
Quality
Uniqueness
Innovation
Relationships
Knowledge
Imagination, and
Energy
Looks simple enough right? But we didn’t stop there. As a team, we have begun to explore the behaviours that speak to each of these values. This is where the real work begins.
I’m not going to go into great depth around each of our QUIRKIE values here and now (as I hear you sigh in relief). I am going to put just one of our values in the spotlight for today. One that is a significant struggle – not just for us, but also for many of our clients and the broader community. ENERGY.
In this context, we think of internal and external ENERGY. Our energetic behaviours include:
- Channelling our energy into ideas, projects, people and products that are important to us
- Actively looking for opportunities to energise debate, learning, thinking and growth in our industry
- Understanding our individual energy boosters and zappers and building strategies to ensure we are the most energetic we can be
This last point is most poignant in this time of a global pandemic. We are, and always have been, a wholly remote workforce right from the beginning. Our employees are from around Australia – many within Melbourne who are under COVID-19 strict restrictions. To understand how each individual person at Pop Education was responding to life under COVID, I invited everyone to tell me more about their energy ‘boosters’. The responses highlighted how diverse we are in our personality preferences and how similar we are in our ideas to build and maintain our energy levels.
The overwhelming energy booster for our team was meaningful communication – in all its guises. The most energetic form of communication was overwhelmingly ‘good old-fashioned communication’. Everything from having a chat to collective deep thinking and thrashing out a problem.
In a team with mostly introverts and a few extroverts, we are exploring how we can offer a boost to everyone’s energy through well-timed, meaningful and heartfelt communication. We trialled one of these strategies this week in our monthly team meeting. Rather than ‘going around the room’ and asking everyone to report on what they had been working on (*yawn* boring), we switched it up for an energising debate. The topic, ‘Virtual Reality is the future of online learning’. Talk about well-timed, meaningful and heartfelt! There was an explosion of energy in all our team members and I sat back and watched everyone become animated, expressive and excited.
Now, I can’t tell you which way the debate leant – Chatham House rules you understand – but that’s not really the point. We selected an ‘energy input’ that facilitated in creating a meaningful and beneficial ‘energy output’ for the whole team. Even our finance coordinator was energised by the whole experience – and, in her own words, she said she ‘didn’t even understand half of what they were talking about!’
For me, the whole experience has been an energy booster and now I am looking for other QUIRKIE strategies that will further drive this momentum. Do you have any suggestions?
