How Mangtas is Building a Strong Remote Work Culture

How Mangtas is Building a Strong Remote Work Culture

Sean: So this is one of the mind-boggling trajectories of the job market day, where a lot of people want to work from home, and want maximum flexibility, as you mentioned. But the question is, how are you building a strong team culture? What do you do that is different from what our other companies are doing who are struggling to keep their talents right now?

Wouter: It’s very funny because even before the pandemic, in my past job, I was a bit controversial because back then again, before the whole pandemic, I allowed my team anywhere in the world to work as much or as little as they want from wherever they wanted. They had no obligations to come into an office. It’s up to them as long as they got the job done. I always believed in that and that has really translated well into today’s world because people who taught 9 to 5 come physically to the office, blah, blah, blah, forcing people to do these things, and waste time traveling. All that stuff right? Now are struggling to keep their talents, like you mentioned, because actually people like the efficiency of working from home.

Obviously it’s nice to come to an office, but deciding when to do that versus deciding when to stay home, and having that flexibility is what people really, really value today. So luckily I came into this business with that mindset already. So there was absolutely zero adjustments required with or without the pandemic. It would have been my approach anyway. I guess now it’s just nice for us because a lot of businesses who are not responding to this make very good talent available to us to pick up. But you had a couple of really good questions. At one point you made was culture, right? And I think culture is very complex, but I think it all starts from the top. It starts with the founders and the executives of the company and how you lead by example. But also it also really depends on how you define yourself as a company and what identity you give yourself, right? So we really spend a lot of time and it took us about a year to really nail down what matters to us the most. And we took a step back and we realized, like, look, if we are going out and talking to people, is it to our own employees, being into our clients, being it to our vendors, being it to shareholders, partners, whatever, you have a very limited opportunity to leave behind an impression. What is that impression? What is the DNA we want to bring forward? And we really spent some time and we nailed it down like we know exactly what we want. It’s reliability. It’s what we deliver to our clients, and what we deliver to our vendors. It’s what we demand from our staff and from us as a company. And that’s how we hire, that’s how we fire, that’s how we instill our operating models. It’s all boiling down to something extremely simple. We initially had a whole code of conduct where everybody had to align to processes. All that because I really wanted culture to be central to what we do, but we nailed it down to something extremely fundamental, extremely simple.

And we ask ourselves one very simple question Is that person reliable? Has that person proven to be reliable? And that’s the main criteria for us to judge whether it’s going to be a good cultural fit or not. There’s obviously a little bit more to it, but the rest is extra