Company culture is a tricky thing to explain. Talk about it too much, and you risk giving people a hard sell. Talk about it too little, and people wonder what you’ve got to be shy about.
A better option? Drop the sales pitch and show people what makes your culture stand out.
In this article, we’ll take you through every step of the 360Learner journey, and show how our Collaborative Learning philosophy guides every step of this journey from onboarding to ramp-up and beyond.
If you’re thinking of joining us, this article will give you a clear sense of what makes us different, and what you can expect as a 360Learner.
How we start every 360Learner journey
Every new 360Learner journey starts with the same first steps. Here’s a high-level summary of what you can expect during your first six months with us:
Alongside these activities and tasks, here’s a summary of our weekly, quarterly, biannual, and annual milestones as a company, as well as the things we do on an ongoing basis:
You may have noticed the 13 values guiding every step of the 360Learner journey. These make up our culture of Convexity, which is the heart of what Collaborative Learning means to us.
Our Convexity culture
Like most great ideas, Convexity grew out of a challenge.
When we started 360Learning, we were a small team with a strong focus on trust, impact, and accountability. As we began working with more clients, it became harder for us to stay lean. We needed a way to empower every member of our team to do their best work by focusing on results over processes. We needed to scale without losing our distinctive culture.
To achieve this, we distilled our distinctive practices into a framework: Convexity.
Convexity is our teamwork system to deliver exponential impact, implement low authority, and promote a fully flexible lifestyle for individuals. It divides responsibilities into subsets that are Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive (MECE), places high expectations for people to succeed, and keeps everyone on track with transparency and accountability.
Our Convexity culture guides everything we do at 360Learning, including the journey from onboarding to ramp-up and beyond.
Making Convexity everyone’s responsibility
Company culture doesn’t just exist in a vacuum–it needs people to make it real.
That’s why we’ve created our 13 Convexity guilds to take responsibility for different aspects of our framework and find better ways to put our values into practice.
When our new 360Learners come on board, they’re encouraged to join one or more of these guilds. They then become the owners of these values, and are tasked with finding ways to improve our habits, processes, and ways of working.
Here’s how it works: let’s say you’re a Repeatable Solutions representative. During one of your sales discovery meetings, you might hear a useful nugget of information. It’s so useful that you decide to document it in Trello and recommend it for inclusion in our onboarding modules.
Congrats! You’ve discovered a repeatable solution and added to our collective capabilities by capturing the knowledge to benefit others. That’s Convexity in practice.
How Convexity makes Collaborative Learning real
Collaborative Learning is a training methodology where people share their expertise, teaching and learning from one another at the same time, and leveraging each person’s skills and ideas. This makes learning social and interactive, driving better learning outcomes.
Convexity culture is our way to bring Collaborative Learning to life for every single 360Learner. Here’s how we use flexible working, transparent performance management, rolling feedback, and a transparent compensation model to achieve true collaboration.
Your Life, Your Way: flexibility, freedom, and accountability
At 360Learning, we’re a remote-first organization. We want everyone to be free to choose where and when they want to work, providing they deliver the right impact and contribute to our shared success. This flexibility is a cornerstone of our Convexity culture.
This has made a huge difference for us during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our systems were already in place for us to work, learn, and thrive wherever we happened to be in the world. Our resilient team culture also helped everyone to stay safe and connected.
Of course, not every company can embrace our radically flexible work culture. Doing so takes the right attitude from leadership, and a transparent system of performance management.
Transparent performance management
True collaboration is all about transparency. This is the flip side of Your Life, Your Way: if we’re going to embrace the freedom of flexible working, we also need to be open about how well we’re executing our responsibilities, and where we can improve.
This is why we embrace the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) model. As a new hire, you’ll set your OKRs with your onboarder during your first month. We make our performance in meeting these quarterly OKRs publicly available, contributing to an environment of accountability.
Our performance ratings and achievements on incentive-based bonuses are also displayed publicly. These are finalized every quarter following our coach and peer feedback process, and serve as a traffic light system to clearly identify where people need to lift their performance. Eligibility for these incentives kicks in during the first full calendar month for new hires.
We also use a transparent system of levels reflecting the expected impact of each individual, based on their skills and experience. These levels affect your salary range and equity grants. We offer the opportunity to level-up by increasing their impact in their current role. Level-up windows open every June and December, including default reviews for new starters.
Lastly, our internal mobility system makes it easy for people to apply to any open role. This way, people have the chance to demonstrate their capabilities in new areas and build familiarity with the wider aspects of our business.
This high degree of transparency and accountability definitely isn’t for everyone, but it’s a key aspect of our culture. When companies are scaling quickly, a culture of transparent performance helps us to know exactly how we’re all contributing to our growth.
Learn more here: Here’s the OKR Process We Created to Elevate Team Performance (+ a Free OKR Template)
Rolling feedback and continuous improvement
Alongside our transparent performance management, we use rolling feedback to create a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
In practice, this ongoing feedback is built into every aspect of our working environment. We use 7Geese to recognize contributions to Convexity culture, and Peakon to run pulse surveys identifying any issues that might be holding us back.
On top of that, we’ve built social responses and reactions into every step of our learning platform to harness peer interactions.
This culture of continuous learning is crucial to the way people learn today. It’s no longer enough to just run yearly employee development sessions and cross your fingers that everything will work out. Instead, people need peer feedback at every step of their journey.
Learn more here: How We Use Peer Learning to Keep Our Company’s Competitive Edge
Our compensation model and Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)
At 360Learning, we expect people to make a meaningful contribution to our growth. In return, we pay well above the industry average, and we also review all salaries every year in January for those who have been with us for at least three months during the previous year.
Our salary ranges are all internally transparent, and so is the compensation model we use to calculate individual salaries. This way, people can calculate their own compensation review ahead of time. Our compensation reviews are based on individual performance, plus our company-wide salary increase budget.
With our Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), all 360Learners receive their initial incentive stock options grant within six months of joining. We run two grant windows each year in January and July, with employees being eligible for performance-based refresher grants every year. These grants vest over four years, are based on employee levels, and are calculated based on our Transparent Equity Grid.
What onboarding looks like at 360Learning
At 360Learning, we’ve made passive, boring onboarding a thing of the past. Instead, we challenge and stimulate our new hires and make them feel welcome from day one.
As a new 360Learner, you’ll work autonomously, but not alone: we use a buddy system to give you the support you need. You’ll clarify the details of your scope within your first week and share these with the company. By the end of your first month, you’ll have designed impactful OKRs aligned with your team goals, and you’ll start to deliver against these.
After three months, your onboarder will launch a formal assessment of your introductory period by gathering feedback from your peers, stakeholders, and coach, and sharing this with you using 7Geese. Your onboarder will then work with you to decide whether you’ve passed your introductory period (congrats!), whether this period should be extended, or whether 360Learning is not the right fit for you.
For more information on how we engage and motivate our new hires during these first months, check out this post on our six steps to a great remote onboarding process.
Stronger together: our approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion
Our Convexity culture is more than just a blueprint for safeguarding the things that make us unique as a company: it’s also a framework for celebrating the different skills, experiences, and backgrounds people bring with them when they join us.
We believe learning should include everyone. That means embracing diversity, inclusion, and connectedness. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity workplace, and we live these values through every one of our processes from recruitment through to compensation and promotion.
Our employee resource groups are tasked with leading specific diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. This means promoting disability awareness, offering self-education resources, and building a strong and ongoing dialogue with L&D leaders on what diversity in learning means.
As a new joiner, every 360Learner is encouraged to contribute to these resource groups and help us practice these values in every one of our daily actions.
Learn more here: How to Develop Anti-Bias and Diversity Training That’s Truly Effective
Environmental Convexity
Beyond guiding our commitments to each other, our Convexity culture also guides our environmental commitments. In early 2020 we joined Leaders for Climate Action, and pledged to achieve carbon neutrality on behalf of our organization.
We work towards this neutrality by calculating our carbon emissions, reducing these emissions as much as possible, and offsetting unavoidable emissions through climate-related projects.
These projects include planting biodiverse forestry in Panama, facilitating clean drinking water in Madagascar, and other global initiatives. We encourage all new 360Learners to get involved in these projects and find new ways to contribute to our goal of environmental sustainability.
How we learn in the flow of work
At 360Learning, we believe learning never stops: even after onboarding, every day should be an opportunity to pick up new skills and knowledge, and to contribute your own expertise for the benefit of others. That’s why we make learning an ongoing activity for everyone.
From regular product and sales training to 'Know-vember' (November learning challenge) or Women History month, we make this easy by focusing on short, impactful courses, and giving people the tools they need to create courses in minutes. This way, everyone can be a learner and an expert, and can share and receive knowledge in the flow of work. Important knowledge like how cats make us better humans:
That’s how we help our employees and our users to stay engaged and stimulated, and to achieve an average of 11 completed learning activities per person every day.
If you like what you see, we want to hear from you!
We hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of the 360Learner journey. We’re proud of what we’ve built with our Convexity culture, and we want to share it with as many people as possible.
If you like what you see here, we want to hear from you. We’re always growing, so take a look at our list of current opportunities and get in touch!
This will be the first in a series exploring our Convexity culture, so check back in for more updates in the coming weeks. We’ll be publishing dedicated articles on how our 13 Convexity guilds work in practice, our remote working policy, and much more.
Stay tuned!
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