Our organizational motto for 2020

Being a company based in Portugal 🇵🇹 that works remotely with clients from all over the world 🌎 for 6 years now, the quality of our written communication has always been something we highly value. Now, given the social isolation context, this is even more important because everybody is working from home anyway.

When it comes to leading a team or a company, one of the major responsibilities of a leader is to have its team aligned. As a CEO, it’s certainly one of my constant priorities. When you’re a small team, say of 5 or 10, it’s relatively easy to keep everyone aligned. However, as we grew to what can now be considered a mid-sized organization of about 40 people, the need to elevate our internal communication into a whole new level became evident.

We’ve recently executed several initiatives in this direction, being the clear highlight, the evolution of our very own town hall event, to which we call Pixeltalks — lots to say about it, better to leave it for a separate post.

So, this year, inspired by Jeff Bezos “It’s always Day 1” motto for Amazon, we came up with our own Organizational Motto for the year of 2020:

Document & Share

Even though COVID-19 is turning this year into the craziest of our lives, with so many moving pieces, we feel the motto still applies.

The word “Document” reflects the organization’s realization that, without creating much more internal documentation than what currently exists, it will be hard to scale the company in a sustainable manner. Over the years, we’ve grown relatively fast, and, in the midst of the chaos that comes with it, regularly documentation was left behind. We’re now experiencing this feeling of documentation debt. It’s time to change it.

On top of everything, the aim is the creation of a stronger culture and mindset of internal documentation.

The word “Share” reflects a recognition that sharing our work, culture, and knowledge is key to our long-term success. It’s our time to give back, share what we’ve built, and learned, believing the universe will take care of the rest. We spent too many years without a marketing team/department which resulted in years without sharing almost anything. It’s time to change it.

On top of everything, the aim is the creation of a culture of sharing.

This motto was announced about 3 months ago internally and it’s already absolutely amazing to see the team using the #Document&Share every single week, to back up some thoughts, ideas, or even projects. 🧡 It makes me feel we should have had a motto a few years ago! But better late than never.

I’m excited about the pick and the guidance this motto provides.

Now, let’s #Document&Share! ✍🏼

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André Oliveira
Founder & CEO