Happy to help

I had my first 'proper' job at British Aerospace, which I started in October 1988. I left that job just over a year later, when I moved north to live in Cumbria, where I took a job with Guardian Royal Exchange. Six months after that, I took a job with a software house in Preston, who put me on a project at VSEL in Barrow. And when that project came to an end, the day before Charlie was born, the software house made me redundant and so, in desperation, I turned to contracting.

So all the way through my career, up until starting Meantime as a full-time proposition in 2004, I've had a lot of different roles with lots of different companies. And what struck me along the way is just how different all these companies are in terms what I'm going to refer to as their culture. Some places were upbeat, with a thriving 'can do' atmosphere and others were quite the reverse.

My second contracting job, with a company called BACG, in Leeds, was simply the worst I ever had. No one wanted to hear about any issues let alone suggestions about how they might be resolved yet they were only to keen to point the finger when things went wrong. I learnt very quickly to keep an original copy of any code I was given to work on, so that I could demonstrate that any problems with what I delivered were there before I started (and I was strictly forbidden to fix any problems I found: I was told to only do what was in the spec).

But in 1997 I went to work at Asda, also in Leeds. I'm not sure what I expected but I was surprised by the atmosphere there. As with the people who worked 'front line' line in the stores, we were all required to wear the 'Happy to help' badges and, despite my initial doubts, I genuinely think these contributed to the atmosphere there, which was positive and upbeat. 

Perhaps the most obvious contrast was when I was working at RBSG in Edinburgh. Having set up the testing for the Internet Banking project there, I was asked to repeat the process at NatWest, which was owned by RBSG, rolling out a variation of the same software. And so it was that for a few months, I spent two days a week in London and three in Edinburgh, running what was essentially the same project with two different groups of people. While RBSG was an energetic culture, where people were on 'on the balls of their feet', NatWest was a place where everything was too much trouble. Commuting in from Edinburgh on a Monday morning, I was still the first person in the office.

When I started my own business, I was consequently very concerned that we got the culture right but it was a lot more difficult and took a lot longer than I ever anticipated. So much of it is about hiring people who share your values and that's not always clear at interview. Once someone is hired, it's not easy to change them although it is possible that a company culture can bring out the best in them. 

Maybe I'll write about this further on our company blog but what I will say here is that I believe that if a set of values are fully and properly ingrained, then they won't (and can't) simply stop at the boundary of the company and one's working life. And so it was today when I offered to help someone who is trying to get an IT project off the ground. I don't expect the work will come to us, that's not why I had the meeting. I simply remain 'happy to help'.

(I took this admittedly overly heroic photo while I was waiting for them!)