Company culture is not created simply by filling an office with ping pong tables and free food, offering yoga classes, and allowing dogs. These are perks, not culture.

Company culture is a description of behavior. And how does a team know how to behave? This is where core values come in.

Five years ago at MailerLite, we wrote down our values and the way we work. These values help a great deal to make sure that everyone is on the same page, especially because we are a remote team.

Company culture is not permanent, nor should it be. When you have a small team, you expect everyone to be available to help you with multiple tasks. When you grow, team members have specific roles and you want them to focus on their job.

This is exactly what happened at MailerLite. We grew to the point where we needed to revise and change our values.

For a long time, we focused on customer support. We even had a policy that once a month, every team member worked in customer support. At the time it was a super fun idea and customers were constantly surprised. Depending on the day, you could have had a chat with the CEO, a designer or someone from marketing.

With a bigger team, it’s a struggle to prepare everyone to cover support. We prefer people to focus on their specific job and to be very good at it. Now developers improve the product and the support team talks with our customers. The support team collects all the customers’ requests and then project managers decide how to implement it.

The journey above is how our value “Deliver WOW through customer support” evolved to “Focus on our current customers”. It makes it clear that our dedication to our customers goes beyond just customer support. It’s a company-wide mission!

In the last 5 years, we had some major challenges. Only in bad times do you get to know what matters the most. We’ve learned that issues can be solved much faster if you know about them as early as possible. 

That’s why we added “Take responsibility” to our values. Before there is a problem, we expect team members to communicate concerns. We also expect everyone to take responsibility for their actions. If there is a problem, we admit it and we fix it.  

Business moves fast. Being able to adapt to new challenges and situations is essential. 

Our newest value, “Embrace the change”, means that we want the team to experiment and to try new approaches. Sure, it means failures, but that’s the only way to move forward and initiate change.

Strong company cultures are not made with things, but with different people from different places who all share a common set of values.

For us, our company values are paramount, but they are never set in stone. They are a compass for success and indicators of our culture that evolve with time, growth, and experience.

Take a closer look at our 10 values that keep us in sync, drive us to do our best and make us happy to be at work. 

When creating a company culture and delivering value, it's super important to walk the walk and talk the talk.

This is why we have a gift for you. We had Lithuanian artists design custom laptop stickers for MailerLite's customers. 

But we want to ask for a favor. Could you share this article? We'll send one of these stickers as a thank you!

Here's a pre-written tweet to make it easy for you.

P. S. Do you have a colleague that could use MailerLite? Refer a friend and save!