What makes Wibbitz… Wibbitz? We decided the best person to answer that question would be the one that built our amazing family culture from scratch – our VP of People Operations Liron.
“If you build it they will come” – Field of Dreams
I used to believe that a job was just a job. Wibbitz changed that for me, but for all the right reasons.
Companies usually will only consider hiring a people operations manager once they reach 50 people on their team. I was recruited by Wibbitz when just 14 people were employed by the company, based in one site (our Tel Aviv office). For me, that reflected so much on Yotam and Zohar’s approach to their company. They aimed to empower their people as much as they aimed to empower their product.
In my opinion, organizational culture is something you need to design, attend to and invest in. That’s what I believe we all have been doing for the past couple of years. Each individual in the company has made it possible for Wibbitz to operate as one team.
So what is the “secret” to startup success?
It’s not really a secret, it’s a choice. To understand people, to listen to people and to let them know they are the company. We all are the company. We are Wibbitz in its moments of success and times of challenge. That’s why we chose to be transparent and give our employees the ability to see the full picture of the business, to be part of any decision making process, to lead projects and to make an impact.
That also means that Wibbitz is its own people, and so one’s own personal happiness, sense of ownership and growth is as beneficial to Wibbitz as is any other parameter. The amount of thought, time and resources that we invest in each individual is massive. When I have my personal talks with team leaders, our objective is to take responsibility for each employee’s happiness. To ensure that each member of the team will leave the office at the end of the day feeling proud, challenged and eager to learn more. And to build relationships that are based on mutual respect and trust.
Bringing people together
We invest great measures in creating a positive social environment within each office. We believe that good personal relationships are the key to enhance growth. That’s why we decided to take the entire Wibbitz family to Greece a few weeks ago. It was amazing to bring everyone together as a united team to celebrate our success and our culture! Beyond having fun (which is also really important) we concentrated on bringing people together.
Although culture can be a vague concept, it always amazes me to hear new employees talk about the strong Wibbitz culture during their first weeks in the company. We’ve even had most of our job candidates mention our strong culture in their feedback surveys. Maintaining our culture is a daily task – having said that, our culture changes each and every day, whether that’s due to a new recruitment or a new idea suggested by a team member. Our main goal is to keep that Wibbitz family narrative alive and to allow each new member to add their own story into the mix as we maintain our core values of respect, care and trust.
I am proud to be part of Wibbitz for many reasons – but mostly because I belong to such a talented, caring, awesome group of people. And that is, I believe, our secret. We just love what we do, and the people we do it with.