Our Values: COFFEE
Learn about the values that drive our company and our decision-making.
Our values are the ethics and principles that guide our decisions and actions. They shape who we are as an organisation and help define the culture we build together every day.
Believe it or not, we had already selected five of these six values before anyone noticed how close they were to the acronym COFFEE.
Great! More hastily-assembled, insincere values mandated by a corporate overlord!
Except we don't have a corporate overlord and these values are far from a gesture. We didn't come up with them to put them on a poster, or on this website, only to never speak about them again. We developed them because we realised that not having them was actively causing us problems.
At one point in time we realised our staff were all pulling in different directions and making decisions based on different principles. None of these principles were objectively wrong, they just represented different philosophies of doing business. It didn't take us long to realise that the accepted term for this phenomenon was "values" and that we needed to define our own if we were to reforge ourselves into a team capable of effectively pursuing common objectives.
We spent months putting our values into words, and we constantly review them to make sure they're as true to our intentions as possible. Today, living these values is considered a core, non-negotiable responsibility for every colleague at Train-a-Lift. Our recruitment process is based heavily on them, as is our process for evaluating performance, and we test our decisions against these values on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
Read on to understand the behaviours in which we expect our values to manifest. Also, please don't make fun of the fact that one of our value titles is indirectly lampooned in the linked video. The joke is that most companies have values that are meaningless and I've just written an essay explaining why ours aren't just window dressing so help me out here, yeah?
Courage
“The most dangerous phrase in the language is, “We’ve always done it this way””
Order
“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast”
Futurism
“The best way to predict the future is to create it”
Facts
“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion”
Enthusiasm
“The problem is not the problem; the problem is your attitude towards the problem”
Excellence
“Be so good they can't ignore you”
* this quote is commonly attributed to Captain Jack Sparrow but I can't find any evidence, be it a script or a video clip, of it actually being said in any of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. I still like to imagine him saying it though, and the quote is the perfect embodiment of our Enthusiasm value, so it stays. If you don't like it: take it up with our lawyer. Unless you're actually from Disney in which case I'd point out that you yourselves have mistakenly attributed this quote to Captain Jack in this article so I'd think twice before sending us a cease and desist given that you're purveyors of blatant lies about your own IP. And don't try to convince yourself you can cover it up by putting 'according to you' in your article title so you don't have to address the fact that he didn't say anything of the sort either. Yeah - we see you, Disney. Train-a-Lift has no association with Disney or the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise so seriously please don't sue us.