Here at Otonomee, we believe our Values shape our vision and culture. They are our North Star that guides us in making decisions, shapes our character and brand, shows partners and potential customers our identity, and serves as a roadmap for our behaviours.
At Zappos, “our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff —like great customer service, or building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers — will happen naturally on its own”
Tony Hsiesh, CEO of Zappos.
For Values to be a cornerstone of culture, we believe that we shouldn’t be afraid to let them evolve with us. To us, Values are living, breathing entities that grow and scale as our company does. With this in mind, we as a company recently revisited our Values.
The concept of Otonomee/autonomy was born in March 2020 in the midst of a pandemic. Across September and October of 2021, we gathered together as a company for five Values sessions. Some of the main things that came to the fore in these sessions were the importance of freedom; to live and choose where we worked, of speed, agility and flexibility for our partners, accountability and trust, growth mindset and to be purpose-led and make a difference to our people, partners and communities. After these sessions, our values were finalised and unveiled in November 2021:
Since then, much has changed and evolved within Otonomee. We have had 25 colleagues across Portugal join our widespread and growing Irish team. As well as this we have forged new and grown existing partnerships. We have weathered the pandemic along with the rest of the world. Since then, we have had the opportunity to meet in person on several occasions, develop and discuss our culture and grow our personal relationships.
In September of this year, we launched our annual Employee Experience Survey. In the same month, we had two in-person Together Days, in Cork and in Portugal. Our day in Portugal was a mix of our Irish and Portuguese teams and included a session on our culture. Such was our enthusiasm for this topic that the session continued longer than planned and our CCO Hilary came away with pages of notes! The fantastic feedback and discussions from our survey and Together Days led us to revisit our values and reflect on our evolution and a formal process began of evolving our Values.
We could see the existing Values that resonated with us most from how they were utilised; in our everyday speech, to partners and in our internal communications. Most of our values still very much spoke to who we are and our culture, but we felt we needed to adjust some and add others. Here's our new set:
Our newly added values are:
Build Personal Connection: We felt we needed a Value to represent the importance of connection to us. We are conscious and purposeful guardians of our culture, and we nurture our communication with each other, with our partners and with their customers.
Do Great Work: We wanted a Value that felt active and that represented our continuous commitment to great work in every facet of our roles. Do Great Work is a value that will be utilised naturally in recognition of the work we see around us.
What was so important about the Values process we went through is that the values came from us; we were empowered as a team to reflect and rebuild and add to our values to ensure they continued to represent who we are, as individuals and together.
Together We Grow.
At Otonomee, we provide people and technology solutions through multilingual customer care to help you move into new markets, level up your customer management processes and deliver stand-out customer experience.
Want to read more? Visit Otonomee.com to learn about our outsourced customer contact services solutions, our approach and how we will support you in championing growth and scale.
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