At Starred we always believed in the value of great working culture. As with pretty much every aspect of building and growing a startup, defining and investing in our culture was packed with twists and turns.

In the first years of starting up at Starred, we executed fast to gain initial traction. The company culture was certainly part of the picture even then - certain work ethics and ways of collaborating while having a lot of fun were core to what made Starred. In 2017, when we entered a scaling-up phase, combined with expanding to the UK and opening an office in London, we began thinking about what our core values were.

So, mid-2017 we defined our values and we thought it was a good starting point. The principles behind those values remain almost entirely intact today. The crucial point was: we forgot to implement them.

In March 2018 we conducted an internal survey to get a feeling of how we were doing in terms of culture. We scored an Employee Net Promoter Score of -8. Anyone familiar with the NPS scale will know this isn't a particularly good number. Ranging from -100 to +100, eNPS measures loyalty in terms of likeliness to recommend a company as an employer. So with a score of -8, there was a lot of work to do - and specifically on making sure we live what we mean when it comes to our values. Mid 2019, and our eNPS is up past +50. The turnaround had a lot to do with our values.

So what does 'implementing' values mean?

We invested a fair bit of time making sure the values reflected the people we had in the organization and what we aspired to, but this wasn't enough. By 'implement' we really mean making sure the company lives and breathes these values and principles. That means giving them visibility, embedding them in our practices and guidelines, and above all encouraging each other to live by them during our time at Starred. The handbook you're reading is all about how we do this.

S Club 7

This was the starting point of our culture project. Lars, Starred's founder, assembled a team called 'S Club 7' - comprising 7 Starred team members from different departments and locations, who would, in turn, represent a handful of people in the organization to voice their interests and concerns. This way we'd get the whole company on board with the culture project. We adopted the 'Engagement Bridge' from Build It by Debra Corey and Glenn Elliot as a method for breaking down Starred's culture and ways of working in different areas.

These are the areas we looked at: