When Culture is your Product

Back in 2008, two Danes, Anders Nielsen and Henrik Berg Andersen, founded Pingala with the idea of creating a company they would want to work in for the rest of their professional careers. Both had personal experiences from long engagements with customers, delivering IT solutions to the ERP market. Both agreed on what they had learned from these engagements.

They now wanted to create something that fitted them perfectly, for the rest of their lives. They wanted great teamwork, fruitful dialogue with customers, and a culture acting as a lever for relation-based collaboration. They wanted high expertise. They also wanted no oversold or derailed projects, and fair compensation and salary. With that in mind, Anders Nielsen and Henrik Berg Andersen founded Pingala, with culture and competency as the two bearing points.

This goal became the litmus test for decisions and actions going forward, as they steadily grew, got more customers and colleagues, and a board of directors. And when Kent Højlund was engaged as CEO in 2013, they all jointly put even more focus on the culture and asked:

“How can we firmly scale the company, AND stay true to the original idea of a company that we would want to work in for the rest of our professional careers?”

“In what ways do we need to differentiate ourselves with regards to our ecosystem, our partners, our delivery mechanisms, and culture – both to attract the right talent, and to beat competition?

”How can we create a 'Blue Ocean' in an otherwise ‘Red Sea’?”

An amplification and further vitalization of the original idea was underway, with the key role models as active and participating catalysts.

Nurturing the idea of a modern workplace

During this continuous exploration, the employees in Pingala began fleshing out the details of the journey that they were on, inspired by personal learning, case stories in the media, and international disruptors. To a greater extent, they began formulating their modern workplace and the guiding principles that they wanted to activate.

At that time, in the middle of the 2010-decade, very few Danish companies were working with this kind of organizational design; hence, Pingala had to invent, inspect, and adapt their own approaches and mechanisms frequently, and with the right timing. All of this was not without debate, learning, mistakes, and changes, but at the same time with huge wins and always a 'people first' mindset.

One thing that became clear was that to be part of Pingala, you needed to have the will, skill, and ability to experiment and change. This change was to a large extent headed by the founders, who, from time to time, stated that they were out of their comfort zone but were absolutely interested and curious to keep pushing the boundaries of their perception of an 'organization'. All these key role models had a huge influence on the cohesiveness of the culture and on the adoption of new ideas.

During this period, a Pingala mission statement was formulated: “An oasis for the market’s most talented Dynamics AX people for the benefit of our customers in a lifelong cooperation.”

Note the serendipitous adaption of the triple-bottom-line of responsive leadership in the mission statement: focus on social capital and value-creation to support economic health.

Much of what they subconsciously and intuitively did – and continue to do – is in line with five guiding principles of the future of work.

Their journey over the past decade has seen them start to work with their mechanisms in a conscious way. They are very much aware of their initiatives and actions, yet they keep experimenting. Pingala is increasingly becoming consciously competent, and the notion of the modern workplace is a clear goal for all employees.

Handling culture as a product

Wanting to move away from the traditional mindset and thinking, processes, staffing rules, politics, sales routines, payment models, and administrative overheads, Pingala gradually redesigned their approach to work.

Initially, it was not a design parameter to avoid middle managers, but the idea of having a totally flat organization with no middle managers was the result of research on the AX-market, seeking a way to differentiate from competitors regarding customer approach, employee approach, organizational structure, and capacity costs of operation. Steadily it became a key point of the internal mindset of Pingala, and such strong culture intuitively calls for distributed leadership-followership, and shared responsibility for actions and success.

This meant that all the traditional processes were on the list for evaluation in the light of the flat organization: how to hire the right people, how to manage mechanisms like salary and bonus adjustments, how to develop and take care of the employees, and how to deliver valuable and profitable customer projects. All of this should be handled with decentralized leadership and shared responsibility.

A few years after the formulation of the mission statement, the term 'our culture is our product' was born. For an IT company, this is a radically different way of thinking, but it is exactly the way Pingala wanted the employees to address the oasis and the culture. This had two implications:

Firstly, that the mindset should embrace the fact that culture is a thing that Pingala produces and identifies itself by. Culture as a product is clearly 'Blue Ocean' and attracts attention from potential colleagues, customers, and partners.

Secondly, that culture should be guided by a roadmap, with actions and projects, with shared engagement, and with a steady rhythm for progress, just as classic IT products and deliveries are.

To obtain this, several frequent activities have been launched, of which only a few will be listed here.

Purpose and meaningfulness

Pingala has a long habit of spending 8-10 full days annually on company-wide workshops, focusing on one or more aspects of the mechanisms of the company, be they culture or business.

A key activity at one such workshop was a visualization exercise to let the employees imagine and vocalize their future in Pingala, and the feeling they experience by looking some two, four, ten years ahead. Sharing those expectations with each other clearly created a bond and has become a part of the company memory that they revisit regularly.

Other workshops have touched upon the purpose, meaningfulness, and the value they create for the customers and themselves, and on understanding the differences in approach to strategy, innovation, culture, identity, and distributed leadership.

At almost every workshop, this has spawned activities that have been handled on the company-wide Scrum board with an agile approach to execution.

Social capital and the networked mechanisms

One very central element for Pingala is the social capital. This includes understanding it, measuring it, and nurturing it. An organizational network analysis (ONA) was conducted twice, with a year in between, to map the employee relationships on four dimensions: collaboration, sparring, energy, and non-professional relationship. This was used to strengthen the quality and frequency of the dialogue and feedback across Pingala.

More radically, it paved the way for peer-to-peer network-based mentor arrangements. They were nicknamed KNUS (Danish for ‘hug’): KNUS is an acronym for ‘Kollega-Netværks-Udviklings-Samtale’, which translates as colleague network development conversation.

With one of the guiding principles being the notion of a flat organization with no middle managers, there was a need to remove the CEO from the traditional hub-and-spoke development conversations and replace it with a network-based mechanism. From a practical perspective, it’s not possible for a manager to have one-to-one meetings with 40+ employees within a reasonable timeframe. From a mindset perspective, network-based peer-to-peer mentoring is in line with the idea of distributed leadership.

Based on the findings in the ONA, a list of mentor/mentee pairs was created. Guided by the principles of the networked approach, a third employee, who worked with the mentee on a daily basis, was also assigned to each pair to act as a bystander. The mentor team meets 4-6 times annually to serve as the central feedback and development mechanism for the mentee.

In this setup, budgeting and funding for education and development activities are handled locally by the mentor/mentee groups; as such, mandate is provided to the KNUS participants in line with the mindset. There has never been an issue with overspending or using funding in a non-collegial manner, as the employees manage the responsibility as if the resources are their own. On the contrary, this has at times led to underspending and has required encouragement to remember to use the funding.

Naturally, the CEO was part of this mechanism on the same level as everybody else and contributed both as a mentor for an employee and was assigned a mentor himself. By removing the manager as the central gravity point for all employee development and instead engaging peer coaching at eye level, a whole new commitment and outcome were obtained.

The results of this peer-to-peer mentoring were clear. The mentees got sparring and feedback from colleagues at eye level, and the mentors were just as happy with the setup as the mentees, as it gave them the feeling of giving back.

The idea of having a team or group of employees to handle the different critical mechanisms was copied to the customer engagement routine, where a ‘Customer-HUG’ was designed. The primary goal was the same as for the KNUS: to engage in a network-based mechanism, as a replacement for the traditional Key Account Management and sales-department-thinking. The intention was to keep sales activities as a concern and responsibility of all employees. The Customer-HUG was designed with a flexible regularity but with two fixed components: a customer advisory board with relevant employees from Pingala and a template to keep the business development and innovation ideas flowing, focusing on the value to be delivered.

Results and outcome

It is clear what has made Pingala successful in this journey towards a modern workplace:

• Charismatic key role models who can establish followership.
• A strong motivation to engage in the development journey.
• Few, but clear, design principles leading away from the traditional organization towards the future of work.
• Engaged employees.
• A continued focus on culture.
• A strict supervision of the network-based mechanisms.
• A willingness to experiment, inspect, and adapt.

The results become clear in all three elements of the triple-bottom-line of modern workplaces:

• Strong social capital within the organization.
• High rate of perceived value, as reported by the customers.
• Exponential growth in turnover and revenue.

Pingala has become an attractive organization, both for existing and potential candidates, and for the customers they engage with.

Clearly – and as an integrated part of the philosophy behind Pingala – all employees need to be involved and engaged in this work. As the organization grows and evolves, new employees with new approaches to work and collaboration enter the scene and influence the shared dynamics of the culture. Continuous reinforcement of the mindset and mechanisms is needed, driven by the key role models.

What now?

Pingala is a modern workplace that aligns with the five guiding principles of the future of work.

Looking at the history of Pingala and the inertia of the transition towards the future of work, there is no sign of slowing down.

Over the years, Pingala has grown from two to 120+ employees, and from below $0.5 million to above $8 million in gross profit. As a token of steady growth, Pingala has achieved the Danish Gazelle award 11 years consecutively. (The Gazelle award is established by the Danish financial paper Børsen and is given to organizations that, over five consecutive years – amongst other things – have continuous growth, and at least doubled their revenue.)

The growth in social capital, value creation, and financials continues steadily, and there is clearly a pathway to surpassing 120 employees across multiple locations and countries within a few years.

The question is: is that what Pingala wants?

On multiple occasions, it has been said that if the growth dismantles or disrupts the culture, the employees will leave. Pingala should be an oasis; a company that employees would want to work in for the rest of their lives.

Growth is not a goal in itself. The oasis of Pingala is the goal.