Our Way of Working
To help us define our working style we always start with our company-wide strategy. This is made up of a problem statement and guiding policy for the year that is subsequently broken down per quarter into small statements and guiding policies. Once we have this in place, we are now able to define the environment we want to create and the behaviours we deem necessary to help us achieve it.
- Technical Designer
If we think something doesn't feel right, personally or at the business level, we speak up. We are all in this to make Lingumi a success, and we need great relationships amongst our peers to get there. We appreciate each other for being honest with each other, no matter how hard it may be.
We are faced with many opportunities and challenges where we'll have to make a decision. We empower the whole team to make decisions at every level, instead of building a bureaucracy. We look at our mission, strategy and culture to assess what the best decision to make is and then make it. We're allowed to make mistakes and are super supportive towards each other to get to the best results in the time available.
When something needs doing, creating or fixing, we have the humility to learn how to do something and then have the courage to try to do it ourselves. This may be purchasing a book, undertaking a course or speaking to a colleague who is seen as the company expert in the thing we want to learn.
We connect everything we do back to our company mission. Our strategy and mission give us focus, helping us understand what we should prioritise, and what we should say no to. Our mission and impact provides us with our 'why' - why we exist in the world as a company, and how the world needs Lingumi to make it a more connected and better place.
We need to consistently be raising our standards and understanding that we all are accountable for this, irrespective of our role. Even if we are doing well, we need to be consistently assessing how we can do better.
Depending on our role, we always aim to delight the customer, whether that be internal customers such as our Lingumi team members, or our users. We always try to go above and beyond for them. Not everything needs to be scalable; we create moments of delight when we can.
Startups aren't easy. In 2019, we had a period with a very short cash runway, and hadn't achieved substantial enough product-market fit. We shared the problem, made tough calls, and had to say goodbye to some team members to survive. The thing that pulled us through was positivity: the team grouped together, and we worked with smiles on our faces to focus on improving our service for our customers! That was a meaningful moment for us, and we reflect back on it with team mates past and present as positivity is a critical value at Lingumi - we're happy people, working on something that makes us smile.
We all make mistakes. However, we always assume good intent from our teammates. Never has anyone make a decision that has derailed the organisation, nor do people try to mess things up or make bad decisions. We trust each other to make the best decisions with the information we have available to us.
We are given the opportunity to dream big, feel trusted and supported, and believe that we can achieve anything we set our mind to. We see everything as a hypothesis and are candid with each other to give honest and caring feedback. This allows us to run fast and tackle big challenges without any fears of repercussions.
We are a team of 24 individuals (and growing), based in four hubs around the world: London, Cardiff, Shenzhen and Singapore. This means we need to be disciplined in the way we communicate to get any work done. As a company, we believe in the art of asynchronous communication, and have invested in the tools to help us get there.
