Talent in Tech: Creating our Company Culture

With offices in three continents and a consistent growth trajectory we need to ensure we’re positioned to effectively compete to attract the top talent in tech in an incredibly competitive marketplace.

Inês, our Head of People and Culture, explains how she has been instrumental in creating our company culture. Inês oversees our HR & recruitment operations, making use of her experience in this field to handle staff and promote employee relations to increase the effectiveness of the company.

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Getting the right company culture is essential for any business to succeed nowadays. Creating a good working environment within your office and teams is key to increasing productivity, quality and happiness in the workplace.

We tend to spend around 8 hours per day, 5 days a week with our co-workers so creating a family environment where we can all flourish, and where we actually want to be is really important.

At The Virtual Forge, we have an even bigger challenge as our teams are international and spread over 5 countries, 7 cities, and 3 continents.

We all work together daily and try to encourage the teams to advocate the same values, as well as sharing knowledge with each other!

How do we do this? Let me give you some tips!

Step 1:

It all starts from the top. Make sure you understand the owners and CEO’s vision, and values, and extract three or four values that can be communicated globally.

Using our CEO’s as an example - they listen, they appreciate ideas, they communicate with everyone and they are always available, sometimes a little too available!!

We tend to follow strong leaders, so it’s important to set a great example!

Step 2:

Once you've defined your values and the company’s culture, it's important you're strict with this and hire people that you are sure will fit.

Recruitment is a key part of any organisation and understanding how the candidate will fit within the team is potentially more important than their skill set.

Step 3:

Make sure when completing your organisation chart, your managers are the closest to the values you would like to run within your company, and they will be in charge of naturally spreading these within their teams, your employees!

Your managers are an extension of the culture and should live and breathe these values.

Step 4:

Never forget to keep the existing culture alive, no matter how long employees have been with your organisation and make sure they are also advocating your culture principles for new employees.

You won’t be able to reach everywhere, but they will.

Step 5:

Regardless of the chosen culture and values you implement in your organisation, make sure you:

• Appreciate individual and team efforts.
• Be thankful for their achievements.
• Always explain why you are saying no.
• Make them feel it’s their home and that any conquer, is everyone's conquest.
• Respect everyone’s beliefs, and they will respect the company’s ones.

These are the 5 steps that we've implemented here at The Virtual Forge. We have been constantly growing and this brings a few challenges. We’re proud of the culture we've created, and we are happy to share how we've achieved it.

Our happy culture provides quality to our development. If you’re interested in finding out more about our projects, our team and what we do, give us call.

We keep our social media updated with our news, and we try to spread around our happiness - follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.