How we really live our corporate values

At blue.works, our values are the path to success

Success is not only based on our performance, but also on the well-being of our team. To this end, we have established a “Hexagon of Values” at blue.works. On the one hand, this is a symbol to “graphically” represent our values. On the other hand, it is also a daily reminder to live our values and thus establish our corporate culture. A culture in which learning from setbacks, agility, shared responsibility, customer focus, clear communication and innovation are not just nice “buzzwords” and presentation topics – but are anchored in our daily actions!

As an interdisciplinary team, we cover all areas of the SAP application lifecycle (ALM). Within blueworks, but also with our partners and customers, we work together closely and transparently. This is important to us in order to implement the best (most excellent, but not perfectionist) solutions. We actively involve our customers in the implementation of their requirements, advise and support them and know how to adapt best practices to the customer’s situation if necessary, with the aim of realizing holistic and, above all, sustainable business transformation solutions.

The question now, of course, is how we can actually bring these values from paper to life. In the following, we would like to describe some of our “tools” and share our experiences with you.

Learning and error culture

At blue.works, we are committed to a culture of learning and error, in which every challenge is an opportunity for growth. Of course, mistakes sometimes occur and, as experts, we also have to acquire knowledge in one area or another. But as a rule, we prefer to talk about success rather than failure and mistakes. To this end, we have created a feedback system that encourages people to give feedback in a playful way. Feedback is given in the form of karma points, which can be positive or negative. In this way, we encourage all employees to give each other feedback across hierarchical levels. We regularly discuss the current karma point score at our Community Days and after a year, the points “earned” can be redeemed for a reward: These range from a donation to a charitable organization, to a visit to a restaurant with the family or even an extra day off.

Of course, giving feedback is easier said than done. Above all, “negative” feedback can be given in both good and less good ways. For this reason, as part of our Mental Health sessions, we learn what to look out for and openly agree within the team what the team’s limits and wishes are.

Another highlight is that we then celebrate our mistakes at the “Celebration night“, where we also award the “Redemption Angel”. This symbolic award reminds us how important it is to learn from feedback and mistakes. Only in this way can each individual and we as blue.works continue to develop.

Agility and flexibility

In today’s fast-paced world, agility and flexibility are naturally very important to us. We don’t just want to “do” agile and plan in sprints and releases, we want to be agile and flexible. That’s why we launched our agile@blue.works-Methodik. For example, we attach great importance to the iterative development of objectives. Our OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are designed in such a way that we break down our large corporate goals into small, quarterly defined parts. It is also particularly important to us that every employee recognizes how the individual task discussed in the daily contributes to the big picture, demonstrates individual effectiveness and achieves our common goals. A key success factor for us as a “happy” company is that each of us knows why we do the things we do: What exactly do we get up for in the morning? How does everyone contribute to our goals? Our vision and our Mission statement that all of us understand and support. It is described in a clear, understandable and motivating way and shows the value we want to create together.

Of course, we have to be able to react to unforeseen events. For this reason, we plan our sprint capacities in such a way that there is still a little room for “UFOs 🛸” (unforeseen objectives). In this way, we avoid too many “spill overs” leading to stress.

The issue of “constant change” is also an important topic in our mental health sessions. We talk as a team about how we can cultivate an attitude that embraces change. In this way, our team is better prepared to deal with the constant fluctuations or transformations in the business world and the resulting customer requirements. Better still, we actively support our customers with our attitude to better deal with the challenges they face and point out possible solutions.

Open communication

Clear, honest and open communication is the cornerstone of trust at blue.works. This is evident both internally, but also externally with our customers and partners. Internally, we create a place of trust in our meetings, but above all in our Community Days: through very honest and open communication from our head team to the individual employees, we also show ourselves as a company to be vulnerable at times. This is then continued in the very regular 121 meetings between team leaders and employees: This is explicitly about how we can improve together, what went well, what went less well and where we are pursuing common goals.

Open conversations can quickly make you break out in a sweat. That’s why we talk about such stress factors in the mental health meetings. Tips and tricks on how best to react in such situations and how to overcome them are also part of the discussion. Highlights are, of course, when individual members of the team point out specific examples where they have reached their limits. We can benefit enormously from this as a company.

Another key component of our open communication is the promotion of gratitude. We have recognized that expressing gratitude on a regular basis increases well-being and strengthens the sense of togetherness within the team. In our mental health sessions, we encourage employees to show gratitude, whether for the support of colleagues, the achievement of milestones or simply for their daily efforts. This culture of gratitude contributes significantly to the positive atmosphere at blue.works and helps us to grow closer together as a team.

We have seen that this mindset of openness “spills over” from us as a company to our collaboration with our customers and partners, so that we can complete tasks and achieve goals more efficiently.

Shared responsibility, success and knowledge

Shared responsibility, shared success and shared knowledge form the basis of our collaborative ethos. Here, too, we try to share knowledge in a playful way: Our “Term of the Sprint“, serves on the one hand as a classic “icebreaker” for our internal meetings. On the other hand, we use this “Terms Glossary” to describe and present new products, features and procedures. For each sprint, we define a topic area for the “Term of the Sprint”. Each team member is then required to define and describe a term from this topic area during this sprint. The topic can be very technical, but also personal or funny. In this way, the tradition is broken up, i.e. we are not always looking for the latest technical term, but also a “soft” one from everyday life.

As a closed group, we also spend the most important specialist event of the year – the SAP ALM Summit – together as a team: here we get knowledge from a single source and have a good time together. But that’s not all: with our small “learning challenges”, we prepare together for new certifications, for example: We have already passed Solution Manager certifications together, the Business Transformation Consultant badge or the ISTQB certification – and as a reward there is of course sometimes a bottle of champagne or a great gift basket. All these activities promote our team spirit and a strong community.

Customer-oriented partnership

Our unwavering commitment to customer-centric service is based on our ability to understand and adapt to our customers’ goals. And that can sometimes be quite exhausting, dear customers . Nevertheless, we rise to our customers’ challenges every day and try to meet them with excellence. In hectic times, our mental health sessions also give us a place and an open ear to talk about problems in our collaboration and find solutions. Fortunately, thanks to our transparency as described above, this is very rare. On the contrary, we consider ourselves lucky to have so many good relationships with our clients, which almost border on friendship.

Innovation and development

At the heart of blue.works is the constant desire to innovate and develop. We constantly check whether we are on the right track and correct mistakes as soon as we recognize them – at the level of each individual, the team, management and the company as a whole. We encourage the intellectual freedom and psychological safety that enable experimentation and unconventional thinking.

What’s next?

We at blue.works think it’s great that our values, which drive us forward, are integrated into our daily lives. With mental.health@blue.works, agile@blue.works and the other “tools”, we manage to not only write things down and print them out on great posters, but actually live them. Our “Hexagon of Values” reflects these values so that we are reminded of them even in more stressful phases.

We invite you to learn more about our values and initiatives on our website and join us in prioritizing mental health in the workplace.