March 11, 2021

 Courtney Little

Life at Elevate workplace of the future

Elevate is building the Workplace of the Future. Our vision is to create a company culture where autonomy, mastery, and purpose are amplifiers for high performance and exceptional customer experience. Our focus is on our people – our greatest asset. As we introduce new initiatives and ideas and learn a thing or two along the way, we thought we’d share.

Elevates Principles: Our Values in Action 

In the spring of 2019, Elevate’s CEO Liam Brown kicked-off a “Principles roadshow.” Inspired by Ray Dalio’s book Principles, Liam sought to get input from our global community to build our own unique set of Principles.

He wanted to get a sense of what was meaningful to our people and our organization. How do we translate our Values – We Care, We Innovate, and We Deliver – into the actions we expect of ourselves and each other? Liam could have written them himself from “the desk of the CEO’s office” in Los Angeles. But as Elevate was simultaneously launching an initiative called Workplace of the Future, how fitting to seek the input from the very people we hope will build that future!

Liam engaged the help of the Workplace of the Future team (that’s us!). Together, we hosted multiple “Principles sessions” of around 10 Elevaters who gathered to get to know one another and share ideas about the behaviors and ideals we want to see represented at Elevate. The purpose was to develop a specific set of principles that resonated with our people, ultimately becoming the fabric of our company culture. We met in person, traveling worldwide to our distributed workforce, and we pivoted and held them virtually when necessary. We’d talk candidly about work or life experiences that have inspired us and also those that disappointed us. What were our moments of Pride? And Prejudice? After lots of healthy debate and spirited conversation, the team would settle on one principle that resonated with the group at the end of each session for further development.

After 18 months “on the road,” with contributions from 150+ colleagues, we ended up with more than forty principles. These principles represented the “kaleidoscope of beliefs, thoughts, identities, and experiences that we bring to Elevate.” We refined these, consulting our global community, and ultimately condensed them into twelve Principles centered around our three Core Values: the Elevate team Cares, Innovates, and Delivers.

We Care. We bring out the best in each other and value our relationships. We respect and value each other’s experiences, perspectives and ideas – feeling free to bring our whole selves to work. And we inspire each other to pursue greatness while having a lot of fun along the way.

We Innovate. We challenge ourselves to keep improving, never settling for the status quo. We actively learn and listen, recognizing our mistakes as opportunities to grow and improve. We take calculated risks, favoring action over perfection. And we encourage healthy debate, sharing opinions, and then deciding and committing as a unifed team.

We Deliver. We delight our customers, living to do our best and doing things right the first time. We are communicative, responsive, and reliable, earning the trust placed in us. We believe that we accomplish more together, as One Elevate. And we step up. Yes, we do. We recognize that autonomy comes with responsibility and that the way to get sh*t done is with creativity and resourcefulness. We won’t let each other or our customers down.

We’ve learned how much farther we can travel together in building the Workplace of the Future by engaging with the people who will live – and thrive – there.