We have four core values at Platypus Digital.
They guide how our team do things day to day, month to month and year to year. They guide what questions we ask when we interview potential new employees. And they guide how we work with our clients.
They are more than the usual single word values like ‘Honesty’ (you should be able to aim higher than your staff not routinely lying at work) and ‘Passion’ (the key question being, passion for what?).
Care about charities
You have to genuinely care about charities to work at Platypus Digital.
We only work with charities, so we believe you have to truly sign up to the concept of charities and care about their missions to do the best job. You might demonstrate be through experience of working in the sector, your own volunteering or fundraising for causes close to your heart.
We show we care about charities by giving our staff £1,000 each to donate to the charity of their choice every year. We also have 10% time, where our team can spend up to 10% of their working week working pro bono for the same or a different charity.
Constantly progress
The world of digital moves fast, and so should you.
We want our team to constantly look for ways to improve. They should quickly know what they’re not good at and learn to get better. They should be looking at our processes for client campaigns and identifying how they’re going to be better next time.
They should have progressed so much that they should almost look at the work they did a year ago and be a little embarrassed.
We demonstrate it by investing heavily in staff training from the best training providers, holding internal and external wash-ups at the end of every project where we wring every last drop of learning from it, and by respectfully helping each other improve.
More talk, less type
Better relationships mean better results, and projects that are more fun to work on. So we put effort into making our relationships with clients as strong as possible.
It’s hard to build those relationships over email. So our team also have regular catch up calls and meetings with our clients. Being able to hear someone’s voice or look them in the eye beats adding to that massive pile of emails any day of the week.
We’ve also banned internal email. Instead, we use Google Hangouts, our project management tool Asana, and we talk to each other.
Be your nicest self
Another way of building good relationships is just by being nice.
Not standoff-ish – we always reply to emails from clients within 24 hrs. Not salesy – nobody likes that pally over-familiarity. Just the nicest version of yourself.
Looking forward to meetings with people you like helps the day go more smoothly. It’s more fun to work with nice people. So we only hire nice people.
