The Community That Makes Critical

This year, we celebrated a journey of 20 years. An intense, turbulent journey, full of ups and downs, good and bad, just like any other ambitious journey. At the heart of such an endeavour has been our community. I have often said that we are a community before we are a company. And what defines a community are the universal values that establish a certain way of living and feeling in everyday life, and strong bonds of unity among its members. I shall emphasise again: it is the community that makes our company and we shall not let the opposite happen.

Unsurprisingly, our culture and team spirit appear time and again in feedback about what our people like most about working at CRITICAL Software.

Therefore, developing a strong culture, based on unity and ethics, and on ambition and standards, has always been a top priority for us at CRITICAL Software. What we have accomplished in this respect is, in my opinion, our greatest achievement. Our community is the pillar - a solid pillar - of our ability to build great teams, in the most ambitious sense of the word "great". Teams of people who take care of each other, and of the collective group, who are proud of our achievements and of our ability to overcome our goals.

To this we may add leadership and organisation, a flat kind of organisation, that facilitates and welcomes individual initiative and autonomy in a spirit of mutual support and cooperation.

Unsurprisingly, our culture and team spirit appear time and again in feedback about what our people like most about working at CRITICAL Software.

But teams are made of people. Taking care of people, our people, is absolutely vital. They are, and they should know that they are, the biggest and most important element of what we are building as a community and a company. They must be excited by the challenges they have the opportunity of getting involved in. They must be challenged, stimulated and draw confidence from being part of excellent teams. They must understand and trust in their career paths and the mechanisms available for everything to happen. Last but not the least, they must believe that they’re fairly remunerated.

If culture and a strong team spirit are universally pointed out as the best of what we are, remuneration is something that should not be forgotten. Naturally, one aspect of how we reward our community reflects on our sustainability – through hard work, our productivity and wealth continue to grow. But, just as important is that we define and pursue rules and principles that can help us to distribute the wealth we manage to generate. Among these principles, our bonus policy proportionally distributes wealth across the company - independently of individual career reviews. And, we operate a rule whereby our highest wage cannot exceed 10 times our minimum one - a policy that has a growing number of adherents among leading companies across the world, but that is still rare.

I fully trust in what we are doing to take care of our people, across our entire community. The steps we take in our careers to be happy are not always obvious and leaders are not perfect: sometimes we make bad judgements and get decisions wrong. But the frank, open-minded and humble way that we discuss the best way that each of us can help CRITICAL to grow – along with its people - has produced many extraordinary, uncommon and ambitious career evolutions inside our community. This is, I believe, at the very heart of what and who we are. The best our company and community have to offer and, most importantly, what makes our future so bright.

Written by Gonçalo Quadros