PolarSteps
OPPORTUNITY
Polarsteps is a Dutch based start-up founded by four friends who have a passion for travel and sharing the exciting stories that come from their adventures. Polarsteps helps you to plan, track and relive your journeys in an easy and beautiful way. Even when you don’t have any connectivity, Polarsteps uses geotracking services built into your phone to capture your exact travel route and they have been connecting travellers around the world and enabling them to share their stories with one another since 2015. In January 2019 Polar Steps reached 1 million users and raised a $3.5 million series A round led by INKEF Capital.
CHOOSING OVERTIME LEADER
The founders of Polarsteps, were referred to OverTime Leader by their venture partner after hearing that OverTime Leader specializes in working with smaller scale-ups to navigate the complexity of hiring and finding your footing as a fledgling company, they leapt at the opportunity to work with us.
Organizational Challenge
Polar Steps’ organizational challenge was in getting all four founders to align on a set of company values. After raising their Series A, they came to us to align, design and deliver a set of company values that would enable them to build the right culture as they scaled.
Solutions & Working with OverTime Leader
We strongly believe that values need to be more than words on paper, they should be actions that the leadership team can role model. Our values process included:
Setting the leadership team up with a self-guided workshop to kick-off the value creation process. We met with the team to get to know everyone better socially and professionally before diving into the work.
A session with the founding team to align on purpose and practical use of values
Multiple iterations of core values to align the team on a value set that would advance the company’s vision
An all hands workshop with the entire company to get them to discuss the values they had come up with, and enable them to bring these values to life in guiding the company vision.
The value creation process spanned several months, to ensure the team had the time to brainstorm, deliberate, and iterate, finishing with a set of values to truly drive their growth. These things are not done overnight, they are done over time.
“We knew we had to do work to tie down our hiring process, but what it really enabled us to do was allow us to look each other in the eye, align on who we are and what we stand for, and have a fierce conversation about what matters as a company It helped us to pinpoint where we want to be now and where we wanted to be moving”
– Niek Bokkers, Creative Director
“A few of us after being asked homework questions around personal values, understood that they weren't clear, and this value defining process was very important for us, really opening our eyes to what actions we needed to be upholding as a leadership team.”
– Niek Bokkers, Creative Director
Sascha Vloet, Head of People and operations remarked a feeling of complete openness and collaboration during the value creation meetings with OverTime Leader,
“In our full team open session, having an experienced person like Gillian to moderate was really helpful for the whole team, everyone felt very comfortable speaking up. We came up with a new value in every session and through talking to each other we were able to bring it to life, “Enjoying the journey”
– Sascha Vloet, People and Operations Manager
Results Achieved
The team was able to create a core set of values to live, scale, and hire by. The team was fully engaged in the interactive exercises that they experienced, and they understood their individual responsibility for driving the expected behaviour and actions on a daily basis,
“Conversations like the ones we had remind us who we are and test us to make sure that we are living out our values everyday. It's not just about putting them on the wall, this is really real - it’s about constantly checking in on what we are doing to live the values that we have established.”
– Niek Bokkers, Creative Director
On top of this, the value ideation process allowed Polarsteps to be more aligned and ready for crisis, manoeuvring swiftly through the rapidly changing COVID-19 environment,
“The value creation process definitely helped us respond to COVID situation. We got compliments on the team process and having alignment really showed us who we are.”
– Sascha Vloet, People and Operations Manager
Lessons Learned
This project's biggest challenge was to get the founders of Polarsteps to have alignment on their company values–they have a diversity of perspectives and the challenge was to hone in and focus on determining the best values to drive organizational growth. We enabled this focus by actually making each individual do the mental work of writing down their guiding values on their own time, and we brought them back together, and guided a collaborative conversation where everyone's ideas were laid out on the table and together, using the new information the team had about one another, they defined their process and created the values that drive their company forward today.