The co-founders didn't come up with these values by sitting in a room with a whiteboard – the values below are a distillation of all the ideas expressed by the team during our Q421 kick-off. We crowd-sourced our values as we didn't want them to just be fuzzy ideals – we wanted our values to reflect the behaviours that people at zeroheight currently embody. There should therefore be lots of places in the company where we can point to right now and see those values in action. If we can't, we should question whether a value is an existing value instead of one we can hope to adopt in the future :)
Values aren't useful if they're obviously positive human qualities like "integrity" – things that any company or person in general should aspire to. The best way we've found to enforce this concept is to think of what we are sacrificing by choosing a particular value. For example, with "integrity" it's not clear what the viable or desirable alternative is that you're sacrificing. Because of this, under each value below we've written the "X over Y" i.e. the compromise we're prepared to make in each case by choosing a particular value.
Well-defined values are one of the most fundamental ways to preserve and strengthen a company's culture. For each value, it's therefore also important that there are types of questions that we can ask interview candidates to assess whether they're a good fit for our values*.* This is a better and much more precise way to describe and assess the infamous "culture-fit" – as values are a lot more clear and less prone to bias than an ambiguous concept like "culture" (which can lend itself to simply mean does the interviewer personally "like" the candidate). For each value below, we've therefore added examples of what we can ask candidates to test whether they would be a good fit with our company values.
🧠 Let’s look after each other
😇 Let’s be humble
🥳 Let’s be humans
☝️ Let’s be owners
🤩 Let’s build a product users love so much they tell their friends
🧗♂️ Let’s push each other
<aside> 🧠 Let's look after each other Burnout is not an acceptable part of the job
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Why?
Many of us at zeroheight, including our CEO, have had our own struggles with mental health. As a company, it's something we understand. So we want to make sure that we're supporting people as much as possible with it. We know the impact that mental health can have on quality of life and we believe it should be treated the same as physical health. The reason it isn't is purely because of stigma, and we think that's BS! Think about this – in the 60s, going for a run wasn't seen as healthy, it was treated as a crime in some places in the US... So we believe (and hope!) that the mental health stigma will evolve too as people become more open about it and aware of it. We want zeroheight to be part of that change and having mental health as a core value is a step in that direction.