At Strise we take company values seriously. Like, really, really seriously. We have three of them that everyone knows by heart:
Our team is part of making the decisions that make Strise what we are, our technology has not become a reality without people making decisions every day.
We believe that the winners of the future are the platforms that can help people answer the most important questions.
To achieve that we need smart people who ask the right questions everyday, and go out of the comfort zone to help our clients stay ahead of change.
Things happen. Unexpected, negative and positive things happen. Instead of despairing we’re always trying to learn and make everything an advantage Strise.
Values are over-hyped and under-used in most Companies, and they often use big words that often don't mean that much; like “trustful”, “energetic”, “dynamic”. Employees often forget them and they don’t translate into action. We don’t know our values by heart because everyone studies them. Instead, we've implemented our values and use them in our everyday decision making.
In our daily work, we try to let the values guide us in everything we do. Our values are not a tool that management uses to set standards for culture. Rather, everyone at Strise uses the values to guide their decisions and thinking. And it is those decisions and that thinking that creates the culture. We started doing this when we started the company four years ago. Now, it’s part of the Strise DNA.
Within two weeks, I too wanted to start making decisions and not just rely on others to tell me what to do. The first value, the one about being Strise, gave me license to do that. And, I felt I was expected to. There is a lot of trust in that.
The best thing is that at least 70%-80% percent of decisions made by employees when they act on their own initiative are great decisions! Of course it can happen that decisions don’t fully hit the mark, but no one is blamed for that. That’s how we like it.
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The Chief Product Officer has a lot on his plate. If I would wait for him every time I need a decision it would slow us down. All programmers at Strise have the full picture of our roadmap and what’s possible in the backend. That really makes it easy for me to make quick decisions without messing up the overall plan.
When we started Strise we understood that as a Big Data/AI-company we needed to be extremely fast. Speed and execution guided the design of our core values. That’s especially clear in the value encouraging making decisions. When you optimize for speed you're bound to make some mistakes. But if we get most decisions right at high speed, that’s a beneficial trade-off.
With the freedom to act I’ve become much more interested in the overall direction of the company. I really want to see the big picture and not just my part. It’s quite motivating and it makes my decisions better.
A common theme amongst employees seems to be an inherent discomfort in presenting in front of large audiences. Enter the value Smart but uncomfortable. Presentations are uncomfortable but a smart thing to do, but in the end they’ve grown from the experience. UxMarit (yes, that’s her actual nickname) thinks that the values go particularly well with the iterative process that makes up the foundation of all development at Strise.
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This value has made me step out of my comfort zone on several occasions. Not so far out that I didn’t like it, but far enough for me to learn something new and also do something good for Strise.
The value “Advantage Strise'' has its origin in one of the founder’s skiing interests. Sigve, the Chief Product Officer, was an active alpine skier in his youth. In alpine skiing it’s not uncommon that weather conditions or the slope suddenly changes. Being the best, like the Norwegian team, also means handling unexpected events better than everyone else. Unexpected things are an advantage for us.
At Strise, if something unexpected happens, positive or negative, everyone pitches in to think constructively and turn whatever happened into an advantage.
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