What is corporate culture?

Defining your corporate culture is about unlocking the beliefs and behaviours that make your business work.

It’s about taking the time to identify your core values and to clarify how those values support (or undermine) your work. This applies to your internal culture as a team, and your external, client facing values.

At its best, a positive corporate culture is a powerful foundation for productivity and growth that supports employee wellbeing and client retention.

The One Page Strategic Plan

At DPM, we use the OPSP (One Page Strategic Plan) to set goals and build the strategy to achieve them. It concretizes our values and the overarching purpose of our organization. It’s a simple way to get everybody, literally, onto the same page. Learn more on how we use the OPSP.

But how does this impact our daily work, and our interaction with clients?

Our values define the way we work together as a team and form the basis for our collaborative and trustful client relationships.

At DPM, our culture is built upon the following values:

• Keep Improving
• Create Impact
• Be Yourself
• Always Transparent
• Better Together
• Respect
• We Make It Happen

Here’s how we bring our values to life

Keep Improving

We’re constantly evolving – as individuals and as a team. We invest in our relationships and we play with new ideas. We give ourselves the time we need to experiment and to connect with each other. We’re always up to speed with the latest tools and trends. This means we can deliver the best possible solutions for clients in a rapidly changing ecosystem.

Here’s how we do it:

• Each employee has a clear development plan with check-ins and support to help them achieve their development goals. We have a strong but unconventional feedback culture based on trust and honesty. It’s called radical candor, and we love it!
• We dedicate Fridays to training and developing new skills.
• We schedule regular sessions to discuss and improve business processes like recruitment, remote work, sales and marketing. Even if things are working well, it’s always useful to refine the approach.
• We conduct project retrospectives. Our process includes reviewing completed work to learn from success and reflect upon challenges. This makes us stronger.
• Sharing sessions and interdisciplinary exchanges to learn from each other and avoid the silo mentality. Each team understands who does what.
• We challenge and support each other to do our best work. This keeps us creative and makes us successful – not just today, but also tomorrow and beyond.

Create Impact

We want to shape the future and to make it better for all of us. We create digital solutions that excite users and make businesses more successful. We’re proud of our results.

Here’s how we do it:

• We see the client’s problem as our problem. We try to find the angle that works best for our clients, and we adapt our approach to help them meet their goals.
• We’re here to facilitate growth; sometimes listening, sometimes guiding, but always bringing the focus back to the customer and how we can serve them in the most impactful way.
• We celebrate our impact with “Celebration Friday”. The whole team comes together to have lunch, to laugh and to publicly reflect on our achievements as individuals, and as a company. This ritual of appreciation increases motivation and employee confidence and significantly improves retention. We can attract top applicants because we have a reputation for celebrating and rewarding good work.

For us, impact is not only reflected in financial success. It’s important to us to give back to society. Some of our current social impact initiatives include:

• Impact Friday: team members can choose to volunteer for a good cause in the local area.
• Donations: we set aside a percentage of our revenue and make charitable donations each quarter. We want our success to benefit others.
• Public projects: We donated over €67.000 in working hours to support Stiftung Ambulantes Kinderhospiz München. We designed and built an app to support families going through the terminal illness of a child. It’s proving to be an important resource for people who need to find practical support in times of crisis.

Be Yourself

At DPM, we’re a team, and we act like it. We’re all different and there’s great strength to be found in diversity. By having a range of personalities in one room, you benefit from a range of perspectives. When people are encouraged and supported to be their true, original selves, we can break new ground together. We respect difference and we value divergent opinions because they can lead to new and unexplored territory.

How we do it: *We don’t judge difference, we celebrate it. *We create a safe, flexible environment where everyone can feel comfortable in showing their true character. *Family and career go together. We give everyone the same opportunities for career development. It doesn’t matter if they’re full-time or part-time. *We value gender diversity and we have an equal male/female ratio within both the team, and management. *We recruit for cultural fit to ensure we stay diverse, and new employees integrate easily into our working culture.

Always Transparent

At DPM, what you see is what you get.

We’re authentic and inclusive in the way we speak to our clients and colleagues. We share our knowledge and we try to include all stakeholders in our processes, (including employees). We believe that transparency is necessary for all parties to perform their best, and feel included. When knowledge is shared, it becomes accessible and useful. By being transparent, we’re inclusive, but we’re also more efficient. As managers, we don’t put every decision up for discussion, but we do include the team in short and medium-term planning. This allows us to predict challenges and brainstorm solutions.

How we do it:

• We’re open and direct in our communication with clients. We have regular check-ins to share the status of the project. If milestones can’t be met, we say so. This means we can adapt to challenges with agility.
• When we have important information to share, we share it quickly. This way, everyone feels like they’re in-the-loop, and that they have the opportunity to shape the direction of the company.
• Our salaries are also transparent. Since our founding, we’ve been fine-tuning our payscale system. This shows who earns what. For us, this is the foundation for diversity and inclusion. Nobody has to worry that they’ll be paid less because of their race, gender or anything else that makes them who they are. At DPM, there’s no need to talk about the gender pay gap anymore, it doesn’t exist.

The value here is not monetary. We prioritize a more inclusive corporate culture because it creates a deeper bond between managers and employees and serves to build trust within the company. It works.

Better Together

At DPM, we believe in the power of cohesion, diversity, and mutual respect. We understand that when people from various backgrounds and perspectives collaborate, we can leverage the unique experience and expertise of each individual to create the highest value for our clients, and society as a whole. We’re supportive and we share all information that’s relevant to our work through an approach that recognises the strength of interdisciplinary teams.

How we do it:

• We combine product, design and engineering perspectives throughout the product development process.
• We streamline workflows to prevent bottlenecks. This leads to greater efficiency and means we can bring the strongest solutions to market, faster.
• We communicate efficiently due to frequent interaction and by increasing levels of social connection over time.
• We have a shared mission and a unified sense of purpose.
• Working together means that we do everything better. We can build and ship robust products faster. This leads to increased customer value and a sense of shared achievement, which further strengthens our corporate culture and talent retention.

Respect

We have a strong culture of feedback and we respect every individual in every context and situation. We speak plainly, kindly and we never gossip.

How we do it:

• We encourage employees to speak up and share their thoughts.
• We give honest, respectful feedback and we take team feedback with grace and humility.
• We respect different approaches on how to tackle challenges.
• We treat everyone equally, be they C-level or intern.
• We keep people informed of what’s happening in the company and how we’re developing. Employees know the current challenges and our plans for the future.

We Make it Happen

We’re driven by the impact we want to see for our clients, and we see ourselves as facilitators.

We’re here to guide our clients all the way from discovery, through to growth and beyond. We’re not “Power Point” consultants who just do the strategy and then leave the execution to the client.

We know what we’re talking about, and we’re excited by digital solutions. We make our customers’ challenges our own, and we don’t mind getting our hands dirty!

The Why?

At DPM this question is the beginning of everything. However convincing the answer, it’s a question we ask each other all the time. It allows us to reflect, to calibrate, and then to motivate.

When we know the “Why?” we can start with the “How?”. Curiosity and purpose walk hand-in-hand, but there’s no substitute for defining the mission and creating clarity of purpose.

We have a strong culture at DPM. We know who we are, and what we’re doing together. We feel like a team, and our culture gives us character, personality and a shared vision. It’s an identity.

What’s yours?