2015: GoodData Company Culture Highlights

‘Tis is the season to be jolly, and at GoodData, there is holiday cheer everywhere! From Brno to Boston, Portland to Prague to San Francisco, we are making the season bright. Reflecting on the year, our CEO Roman Stanek said, “2015 was about staying true to the GoodData DNA and our culture is defined by the amazing spirit of our teams as we capture new markets and strengthen the trust of our customers, investors, and employees.”

“Building a company is not easy,” says Ben Horowitz in his book “The Hard Things about Hard Things.” While we are far from perfect, we are jolly about a few things and wanted to take a moment to thank this incredible team and share some highlights from our very own GoodData Family!

1. Customer Obsession

Our culture is driven by our core values, and this is our number one company value. A company built by people who care about creating value for customers is one that will sustain its value over time. Congratulations to our Sales and Services teams in ensuring large numbers of Go Lives for our customer base. Our rockstar support team won the 2015 Gold Stevie award with an unprecedented 99% CSAT level! Our engineers in Prague and Brno handled a 300%+ increase in data volume growth with no increase in operating costs — crushing it!

2. What Works and What We Can Do Better: An Open GoodVoices Program

The ability to talk about problems — both positive and negative — is key . Leadership needs to be able to hear feedback in a candid way, which is the aim of our GoodVoices program. Through this program we get a lot of candid feedback from employees through anonymous engagement surveys, focus groups, and through GoodVoice champions from every function. We then transparently share the results company-wide, and pick a few areas of focus that we work through. Our top-scoring item in the survey relates to our work environment, that supports innovation and encourages open feedback!

3. Pillars of Our Wellness and GoodLife Program

In January 2015, we launched GoodLife –our Wellness program run by our  employee champions. Our mission is to provide the entire GoodData family with healthy lives and promote mindfulness. We did this through empowering our team members in three ways:

• Encouraging friendly competition, team building activities, and active participation.
• Scheduling yoga, walking, running, and cycling activities on a weekly basis, across our international offices.
• Supporting mental and emotional health needs by supplying every employee with a free one year premium membership to the self-care app, Shine

Our GoodLife program led to participation levels that were 100% above the benchmarks we had set at industry levels, based on programmatic monitoring, gamification, and prizes!

4. Facts About Our Women in Leadership

This year we launched our Women in Leadership Program, with our CFO sponsor, Pete Godbole, who believes, “Women's leadership has been about enabling women to build a career in an open, inclusive and supportive environment." We invited Caroline Simard, Research Director from Stanford University, to speak to our entire team on unconscious bias, and she even felicitated our progress on this program! Here is where we landed at the end of the year for our US team:

• 57% of female employees are Directors
• 34% of female employees are Managers
• 34% of female employees are in technical roles
• 34% of employees are female

5. Company Traditions

At GoodData, we love our company traditions. CZ Conference Day, where employees share their knowledge with the rest of the company, on any topic that they are passionate about. Lunch and Learn with Customers, where we build a stronger connection with our customers. Bring Your Kids to Work Day in June, and our Prague office celebrates St. Nicholas Day in December, where the whole family is invited to the workplace! Finally, our Sales Rally where our field teams gather every year to connect, strategize and have fun.

6. Key Hires: A Strong Leadership Punch

We were thrilled to make several key hires and promotions to leadership this year, strengthening our existing leadership bench. Our key hires this year include: CMO, RVP Sales, VP Services, Chief Security Officer, VP Product, and a VP UX.

7. Inclusivity and Diversity That Fuels Creativity and Innovation

The favorite events of our all-star engineering teams were, hands down, our Hackathons! Our most recent one included 26 teams competing from both sides of the Atlantic ocean. There were not only many interesting projects developed, but also many cups of coffee consumed. The sense of achievement and team-building reigned supreme!

8. Continuous Development and Feedback That Keep Us Agile

Change is the only constant and this helps our team adapt and scale to a dynamic and fast changing world of BI and Analytics. Our Performance Management process focuses on real time feedback and ongoing development planning vs multiple cycles of rankings or ratings. This year we rolled this out globally and all of our employees and managers engaged and participated in the process.

9. GoodPeople DoingGood

This year we also came together in giving back to our community in a series of events in every location.

10. Intentional Collaboration

Keeping a company connected over multiple locations, continents and time zones is not easy, especially when we move at the speed of light. So we don’t leave communication to serendipity, and have regularly scheduled weekly town halls, All-Hands, and offsite meetings. We also have a monthly newsletter where employees contribute stories, pictures, and memorable moments with each other.

11. Heartfelt Team Events

Lastly, our holiday parties and annual offsites are events where we get together, have fun, and connect with each other in a truly memorable heartfelt way. So, if impromptu speeches accompanied with tears of joy, flash mobs, et al, aren’t your thing we will understand…

12. Year-Round Celebration of Successes

We fight hard to win and make sure we take the time to recognize and celebrate our successes and have fun while we are at it!

Header image from Caley Dimmock on Unsplash