Co-Creating our Mission and Values with our People

Today we publicly launch our new values of Choice, Innovation, Trust & Community. When our CEO DP introduced our new vision to our people in June – to “Bring the infinite potential of open source to the enterprise” – we were reaffirming our expertise and belief in open source. The next stage in this journey was to create a mission statement and new company values. We did this a bit differently, attempting something bold that felt right to our culture and our people. What followed was something that I’ve never witnessed at an organization before. Instead of hiring creative consultants to tell us how we should feel about our culture and our work, we did it collectively and asked the experts: our people.

Our biggest ever people engagement event 

The whole company was invited to be involved. There were 60 in-person workshops, and over 1,000 of our people attended virtual workshops. We heard from most of our people. The workshops were led by a community of our leaders across the world, who we knew would be able to run them in the most culturally relevant and fun way for their teams. Our system made sure we didn’t lead the witness. We gave them a blank slate of open-ended questions and free-text boxes. We used unique flashcards with adjectives that asked our people to think about the words they’d always or never use to describe SUSE. They then brainstormed together on what they thought our mission should be, and all submissions were carefully recorded.

The people’s vote

We then asked our people to vote on a shortlist of missions, which was then validated by our leadership team. Unsurprisingly, our people and our leaders were completely aligned on our winner – “We transform open source innovations into enterprise-grade solutions to give customers choice”. As with our vision, open source and choice are at its centre, and the response from our people was overwhelmingly positive.

We also took the adjectives from our workshops and when we analyzed how our people had organized them, our new values were obvious.

Choice

• We are continuously making choice happen
• We are accountable for our choices
• We never get complacent

Innovation

• We foster a culture of experimentation, and embrace change by challenging the norm
• We are committed to continuous improvement, creativity, and adaptability
• Ideas are great, but without execution they are just ideas

Trust 

• We are trusted to deliver with integrity
• We offer trust by default, and do not wait for it to be earned
• We foster an environment where everyone trusts each other

Community 

• Nobody is smarter than everybody
• We embrace diversity of thought
• We are “open source first, upstream first” where collaboration benefits all
• We uphold meritocracy by welcoming all participants & rewarding results

What’s really exciting is that, from the new year, you’ll be able to do something similar at your organization. That’s because, in true open source style, we’ll be making the tools we used available to you in the new year, so that this approach can be tried by others. I’ll share more information on my LinkedIn and here on our SUSE blog, but I’m already looking forward to seeing how this could translate in other companies.

Writing our mission and values in such a meritocratic way is only the start. Our culture is made up of the millions of things all of our people do every day. This is what really makes us who we are. It keeps us accountable and always improving, and it sets us on the path to true success.  If you like the sound of working at a place where company missions and values are decided collaboratively, visit our careers page and come join us.