To help business leaders get to grips with developing the right culture, Tim Savage, co-founder of London-based cloud migration consultancy Armakuni shares how values help focus on rediscovering joy on software deployment projects
“The whole dynamic of business has changed,” suggests Tim Savage, co-founder and chief executive of Armakuni, a business which builds and migrates cloud platforms ‘with companies, not for companies, working with and supporting teams to implement and embed the right tools and processes’.
He gives two examples:
“The mobile phone has become a different medium for communication than it was originally intended to be, which now has a profound influence over our lives at work and home,” he says.
“And without the journey to and from work we’ve lost the downtime to process our thoughts, something commuting allowed us to do.
“Our working day is often determined by how many video conference meetings can be scheduled in, so everything becomes more tiring.”
Actually Savage is being observant rather than negative. After all, how many IT companies describe their purpose is to ‘return joy and creativity to the world of software delivery’. “That’s not something we express to the client-facing world, and that’s not how clients would articulate it, but it’s what we set out for them to experience,” he explains.
“It used to be that companies didn’t really talk about the values they represented, on the basis that doing the right thing was evident in their behaviours, but certainly since the pandemic and perhaps because of the growing influence of Gen Z, there is a requirement for businesses to be more formalised and upfront about them.
“I have to say that values and principles are incredibly difficult to put into effective words, to get the message across in a way which sounds authentic rather than calculated, and I would imagine it would be hard for a company to live by values if it has a strict hierarchical structure in place.
“Values govern our behaviours. Principles are our beliefs which determine our actions. Practices are how we make it happen.
“I remember the CTO of a major bank coming up to me after I spoke at a Google conference about our work enabling Comic Relief to take and process donations in real-time during the transmission of the programme. It struck him the way we were able to make significant adjustments to how it was done in real time while enabling 350 card transactions a second to continue uninterrupted.
“With his 1000 staff, he said it would still take months to get a comma changed in code. Because of that, we saw an opportunity and pivoted our business to providing a service to deliver the mindset to enable it to happen at an organisation. It has to be about developing enabled, empowered teams which can make decisions themselves rather than wait for tasks to drop into their hopper.
“A generative culture within a team provides a focus on doing the right thing. Values give people pride without which they can become defensive.”
“The question,” says Savage, “is how does a company get to a position where its people are comfortable talking about issues, because if we aren’t able to discuss mistakes without the fear of blame being apportioned, then we aren’t going to learn from them.
“The business imperative is obvious. And zero blame, by the way, isn’t about not having accountability.”
According to Savage, employee engagement can be identified by asking a member of the team not just what the company’s values mean to them, but what they understand to be the strategic purpose of the work they are doing. And he points out that behaviours can’t simply be imposed, no matter how well-intentioned.
“To introduce change, a company told its staff they could deploy whatever technology they were comfortable with - rather than IT being completely prescribed,” he says by way of example. “Of course, the whole thing fell over because people couldn’t cope with having to make that level of decision. At the outset, there needs to be guardrails. It’s like the company is the equivalent of a narrow-gauge railway. As people become more confident and advanced, the track can begin to widen.”
Savage believes that values mean a company becomes a way of life for people, and help to create a desire to pull together because they facilitate engagement with the purpose of the company and the journey.
And he makes the point that just because people are passionate about the company and what it produces, it isn’t necessarily the case that it conditions their behaviours in the same way as values.
“If their commitment is based on years of working for the business, it is entirely possible they are both passionate for the company and resistant to change,” Savage explains.
“It’s values which enable a culture to be developed which is open to change. I always say values should enable a company to change the engines while the plane is still flying.”