Introduction

Vipps and MobilePay is becoming one company. But, people don’t become one big happy family just because someone somewhere signs some merge papers. In an internal survey, 50% of the employees state that they struggle with different cultures and different ways of working.

Below are some key takeaways from the survey. Note that these are not necessarily things to “fix”, but to be aware of and understand the consequences of.

• We work and collaborate differently both in teams and across teams
• We have a different understanding of teamwork and roles
• We have different cultures for internal communication and sharing
• We have different processes in teams, and also in the organization as a whole
• We have different leadership styles
• We approach risk differently and have different risk appetite.

To help us become one company, we have created new company values. One of them is #OneTeam. And as someone sarcastically commented, the only reason you’d need a value like that, is because you’re actually two teams. So what to do?

First of all we need to embrace the fact that this will take time, and that a joint culture isn’t something we can implement or roll out. Instead of imposing hard rules and processes, we are creating ways of working principles to guide how we behave and work together.

Agile coaches and Ways of working principles

We have established a central team of Agile / Ways of working coaches who work across the entire company, but also have dedicated areas to support. Our focus is to continuously remove obstacles related to collaboration, culture, organization and process to improve our ability to create customer value.

We have gathered information and feedback from the organization to understand what is important in the coming period, and how to come out in the other end with the “right” culture and focus. Based on this input, we came up with four main principles for our ways of working:

We solve problems through insight and experimentation

We build teams fit for purpose

We embrace new perspectives and take well-judged risks

We prioritize based on a clear direction

The principles apply to everyone in VippsMobilepay. Great stuff, right?

We are painfully aware that we are now about 1% done with the work needed to establish a common ways of working. And what does that even mean in the first place? While we have a number of ideas, we don’t have a clear plan on how to move forward. Organizational change is within the complex domain, which means we can’t figure out up front exactly how to do this.

Luckily we have a great team of coaches eager to experiment their way towards a better Ways of working. It will take hard work to help teams and leaders build a joint culture, focus on what’s important, ensure we don’t drown in red tape despite quick growth, not forget to have fun and care for each other, etc, etc… 

We also understand that the simple statements making up our principles will be understood differently by different people. To make it clearer, they are currently accompanied with a list of behavior we’d like to see, and that we don’t want to see. Internally, we will also further expand them with examples and details going forward. We will share more detail in later posts — so stay tuned.