Our Mission?
We make teams thrive with healthy feedback
Feedback enables us to adapt, evolve, and excel. It’s the basis for team performance and engagement. But giving and receiving feedback can be hard, so people shy away from it. This allows problems to brew and then cook over.
We believe that giving helpful feedback is a superpower that anyone can learn. Like a coach, we encourage and teach people to request and give feedback frequently. We help embrace feedback, we ensure that action is taken, and we don’t rest until positive change is confirmed.
By promoting improvement across the board, by recognizing good work, and by alerting leadership to problems in time, we ensure that teams thrive.
Our Core Values
Champion Improvement
The company is what we make of it, and we want you to actively shape it. Especially when you spot a problem or see room for improvement, don’t grumble or keep it to yourself, but voice your ideas, convince others if necessary, and make change happen.
Feedback is our Superpower
We value the courage it takes to give feedback. We understand that critical feedback is given out of care and a desire to help us improve. In the face of tough feedback, we remain calm and receptive, using it as an opportunity to grow. By embracing feedback, we foster a culture where everyone feels safe and encouraged to share their insights
Deliver Value Rapidly
We want to deliver customer value quickly and at good quality. Rather than shoot for perfection upfront, we look for the smallest thing that can make a difference, implement it pragmatically, and take it live early. We collect feedback, refine, and then make a call based on metrics: Good projects stay; from failed projects, we learn – and take farewell.
How we work
We want to be a fantastic company to work for. We want to make a great positive impact on our user’s lives, and we want our staff to enjoy work and build their careers while at SI. We want everyone to look back fondly on their time at SI for many years to come.
For this to work, we constantly refine our values and culture. We have expectations for our staff, and likewise, employees should have expectations about the company and help shape it. Above, you found our core values, here are a couple more hints of how we work.
Employees First
As a company, we do need to make our numbers in order to keep everyone employed. And all our money comes from our customers – we don’t have investors to turn to, for better or worse. But we can only serve our customers well if our team is highly engaged.
So if we have to make tough decisions between Employees vs Customers, like “make a customer wait vs make an employee do overtime”, we believe in Employee First.
We’ll always strive to avoid such situations with good planning, but if push comes to shove, we’d rather make a customer unhappy than an employee. An engaged team can win back unhappy customers, but happy customers can’t win back a disengaged team.
We believe in each other beyond SI
We ensure work-life balance, encourage learning and career development, and offer diverse workplace experiences. We’re happy to discuss career changes from one role to another, too, and many staff members have evolved a lot during their time at SI.
If a career change can’t be offered, though (we’re a small company, after all), we will help with a transition to another company that offers this role. We’ll also try to adjust your career growth plan so that you can gain the skills needed.
We're cross-functional
At SI, a lot of work happens in cross-functional teams. A developer will work directly with a marketer on a project, and a salesperson will collaborate with a customer success person.
Of course, developers will also have their “dev only” meetings, and so on, but if you’d prefer to work only with your own kind, then we’re not right for you.
Creating the best workplace - with your input
We strive towards workplace happiness and want to resolve problems as soon as possible. We constantly ask employees for feedback, for instance, with surveys, retrospectives, and within 1:1s, and try to make work as engaging as possible.
Everyone is required to participate candidly – we can only solve problems if we know about them. If you don’t think it’s necessary to mention certain problems that’s ok, but then don’t grumble later on either. People who turn negative and ruin things for others will be asked to leave.
We help each other shine
We’re a small team, and everyone needs to be remarkable in what they do. But we remain humble and prefer to praise others rather than ourselves.
We lend a hand behind the scenes and give space to every individual to contribute, grow, and shine in their own way. The better others get, the happier we feel for them.
We are independent
Small Improvements will remain independent and sustainable. We want to grow our headcount moderately to achieve goals faster, but we don’t look for funding and will stay a tightly-knit team.
We all share in the company’s success; our only stakeholders aside from us are our customers. Thanks to low turnover and ambitious people, we are able to deliver big projects even with a comparatively small team.
We're a team of professionals
Work should be stimulating and help you grow professionally. It should also be fun, and there should be great perks. But you also earn a salary, and we expect you to deliver a big impact continuously. We’re not a family where love is unconditional; we’re a team of professionals who all want to be successful. If your impact declines and is down longer term, we will have to have tough conversations on how to get it back up.
As an employee, you can expect clear and candid feedback from your manager, and everyone gets a second chance. But we don’t believe in third, fourth and fifth chances to address the same problem. We employ the “keeper test”, asking ourselves, “If this person were to hand in their resignation tomorrow, would we fight to keep them?”. If the answer isn’t a strong yes, we’ll consider how we can get to “yes” again or whether it’s better to part ways.
We're self-driven
We do have an overall company vision, and we do have broad company goals, and there are goals for the departments and squads. When you join, there is no shortage of things to do. But once you get more established, we expect you to actively contribute to our direction.
There are always a multitude of ways to achieve goals, and you need to research and propose your own ways. There won’t be someone to always tell you what to do. Once you’ve shared your ideas and proposals, you need to be fine with being questioned, you need to invite feedback and accept and integrate it.
We give back
Small Improvements couldn‘t exist without all the great infrastructure that our countries, cities, and communities offer. We recognize and value all of these, so we do pay our taxes without looking for loopholes.
In addition, we give back to the community in general, for instance through our annual donation program, by avoiding dodgy clients and by enabling staff to donate time and effort to good causes, too.
