14. February 2023
M&M
Love, growth, trust, discipline and sustainability – as a team we believe that the best way to have a strong and healthy relationship with each other, with our job and everything that goes with it, are our values.
So today is about love – and to provide an answer to Hadaway’s question (from the ’90s): Love helps us build our VAST FORWARD culture, around a distant but centered collaboration, to create an environment that Teamwork, creativity and innovation enables and encourages.
So enjoy your chocolate – we hope you know who to party with today!
The values for our small organization VAST FORWARD are more the “result” of our development over the past few years than a basis from the founding days; Our values are therefore also answers to a wide range of questions about our structure, and they formulate something like our (target) attitude towards our “products”. Our values are also a principle of order and sort the requirements that we encounter in our remote everyday life; and finally they are also a commitment – to “how and what we do here as a team”.
This small series of blog posts is about our values. Today it’s love’s turn!
It might seem unconventional to include “love” as a value in a professional setting, but hear us out. After all, we spend most of our waking hours working, and we believe that work should come with its own emotional investment, otherwise our demanding, self-organized remote structure would not be feasible. The consequences of lacking this emotional connection can range from simple job dissatisfaction to burnout.
At VAST FORWARD, we aim to create an environment where we can find positivity in our work and perform at our best. Of course, the expression of love at Vast Forward has as many nuances as the number of individuals on our team. We simply use “love” as a positive term to describe our professional behavior.
It is important to note that Vast Forward avoids work-related emotional dependencies, toxic relationships with work, and blind love for what we do every day. We do not aim to sugarcoat or prettify anything—we all know from our personal relationships that this doesn’t work.
“Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more…!” Haddaway, “What Is Love?” 1993
So what does “love” mean as a value at Vast Forward? It stands for healthy, self-determined work, a respectful, trusting team, a critical self-reflection of our own role, and a workplace where we feel safe and comfortable.
“Love” helps us bring our emotional selves into our work in a positive and healthy way.
As a shared value, “love” keeps Vast Forward functional and alive even in the midst of daily stress.