Flexibility is highly appreciated at our company. In fact, as our own data shows, flexible working hours and having the option to work from home is the number one value among our employees.

Some of us value it because we’re night owls who have a hard time staying awake and doing amazing work in the mornings.

Some have small kids, and with that comes family obligations, such as meetings at the kindergarten or swimming classes for babies at odd hours during the weekdays.

Others simply enjoy working from home (“WFH”) from time to time, away from distractions (like listening to our common playlist on Spotify), so we can concentrate on complex programming tasks and content writing.

While working from home for a full month and a half was completely different from the occasional “WFH” days, having that option - and most importantly, being able to learn from our past experiences working remotely - was of key importance to us when we had no choice but to lock down our office.

What we have learned from “WFH” during the lockdown, though, is that we have to organize our work schedules even better.

We have to get better at communicating with one another, whether this means scheduling more individual/team meetings, or simply setting up daily catch-up calls for the entire company.

Even planking (our daily routine prior to grabbing a joint lunch) needed to be reconsidered during the lockdown - and taken online, with Tabata videos playing in the background of our homes as we counted each plank individually and then reported our progress back to others on Slack.  

Most importantly, we have learned about our mission - and strengthened our beliefs in what we, as a team, stand for.

This should have not come as a complete surprise to us: our data suggests that mission is the second most important thing we value at work.

But for a newly founded company, fighting the issue of mishiring due to cultural misalignment, building a product that is highly dependable on businesses being willing to invest time and resources in understanding their company culture better is not an easy task.

During the time of high uncertainty about when the world will be healthy enough to (fully) get back to its feet, many companies around the world have already started to take protective measures to save their business.

They have cut down on their daily costs, limited their monthly budgets, even let some of their employees go, and freezed any new hiring for at least a few months in a row.  

To be frank, it can be difficult to stay motivated during the times when the grounds on which today’s economy is standing are shaking without much control and enough safety cushions to fall back onto.

But in these tough times, it has been our mission that kept our hopes high and helped us to push forward to build an even better, stronger product that we believe will improve the ways organizations approach their people management and hiring for good.  

So here’s something to think about: What have you learned about your company culture during the times of crisis?