High Trust Environment
Octopus Deploy may be different from anywhere you have worked before. Take some time to understand how we think about working together so you know what is expected of you, and in turn, what you can expect from your workmates.
We have designed the way we work on these fundamental building blocks:
We want to do the best work of our lives at Octopus and help our workmates do the same
We want to start from a position of trusting our workmates and being trustworthy ourselves
We want to work with a healthy balance of freedom and responsibility
We want our best work to be enabled by the privilege of flexibility
We want to measure our performance by real outcomes
Trust is at the heart of how we work at Octopus. We hope you'll do the best work of your life while you are here, and we extend an enormous amount of trust and freedom to allow you do to that.
We use these priorities to guide when, how, and where we do our work - in this order:
Be responsive and helpful to customers.
Be responsive and collaborate with our teammates.
Execute as a results-oriented individual contributor with clarity and pride in your work.
Some companies use carrots heavily - bonuses, commissions, and all kinds of incentives tied to results. We don't do that. We want you to feel free to do the right thing for our customers and our business long term, without conflicts.
Other companies rely on fear (the stick). They get results, but there's a better way.
You'll find that people at Octopus are, as a rule, genuinely nice people. We don't rely on carrots, and we don't rely on sticks. We believe that in the absence of both, you're left to find your own sense of fulfillment and purpose while at Octopus. For some, this comes from being proud of the impact they have on customers, or pride in the quality of the work they've done. For others, it comes from peer recognition, or an internal drive to grow and achieve.
Your teammates at Octopus are here because they want to do work that they're personally proud of. While you're here, do the best work of your life. Not because your manager asks you to or for extrinsic motivation, but because you’re part of the team and everyone on your team is trying to do the best work of their lives. Trust your teammates, and conduct yourself in a way that is worthy of their trust.
One of the secret benefits of working remotely is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge performance. When you can't see your teammates all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work and this means a lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away. Criteria like "Were they here at 9?" or "Did they take too many breaks today?" or "Man, I can't believe they didn't iron their shirt today" aren't even possible to track.
What you're left with is "what did this person actually accomplish today?". No doubt this is the only way we would all want to be judged.
We've seen first hand that our best work happens when it's done by people who bring a range of backgrounds, experiences, and skills. When we started, we hired people that we knew, who recommended other people we knew, and so they tended to be people who are similar to us. As a result, we're not as diverse as we'd like to be, but we're working to improve that. We'd like to get to a point where our team represents the entire range of backgrounds of the customers we serve - in educational backgrounds, age, race, gender, neurotype, and professional and personal experiences. We're constantly tweaking our hiring, onboarding, and coaching practices to support this.
We've built a culture of maturity, trust, respect, and openness. We understand that work isn't the #1 priority in life, and we're very accommodating towards people's life circumstances and need for flexibility and understanding. We think that this makes Octopus an exceptionally welcoming and supportive place for people with families and special needs.
