Revolut’s DNA journey: what we found out by reinforcing our core values

People · 21 March 2023Karolina Gruszczyk

We believe that success at Revolut comes from two things: our people and our culture. Brilliant people operating in a great culture will produce the best outcome. That’s why keeping the culture healthy and fresh is our top priority.

Recently Oleksii Mukhin, Operating Partner at Revolut, and our CEO office team took a closer look at Revolut’s values. They interviewed 100+ Revoluters to understand how our culture is perceived across the organisation. Here’s what they found.

What’s the meaning of company values at Revolut? What’s the story behind Never Settle, Think Deeper, Get It Done, Dream Team, and Deliver WOW?

Revolut’s values aren't just words on a page or neon lights on our walls, but a set of guiding principles that shape our decisions and actions every day. They’re not just slogans, but part of our day-to-day language. We often say that we need to ‘Think Deeper’ about something or ‘Get It Done’.

The company values at Revolut have been consistent throughout the company's history, starting from our first culture deck, back in 2015. They’re realistic and direct –  they represent what we care about and reward for.

These values are also what sets Revolut apart. Not everyone is meant to be aboard the rocketship. We value transparency, so candidates know what to expect from the company, and if they’d feel good about being part of our Dream Team.

So, three out of five current values were first presented in 2019 - Never Settle, Get it Done, and Think Deeper.

In 2020, we added Dream Team and Deliver Wow to our values.

Never Settle is described by Nik, our CEO and Co-founder, as one of the overarching principles:

  • We Never Settle on problem solving, even if someone says that something is impossible – we Think Deeper
  • We Never Settle on execution, even if we meet roadblocks on our way – we Get It Done
  • We Never Settle on our team, we hire and retain the best – we’re building a Dream Team
  • We Never Settle on the quality and simplicity of our deliverables to awe and inspire – we Deliver WOW

What was the reason for re-writing the values?

Challenging the status quo is in line with the Never Settle value. Our initial set of values was released before COVID; after that, we grew 4 times more with our remote-first approach. As of now, our average team of 10 employees is located in about 4 different places.

In this project, we focused on the clarity of our values description, so everyone can accurately describe them, and use them in a consistent manner to promote alignment, and help us achieve our common goals.

What was the process? What were your main goals?

Our main goal was to ensure the same understanding of what our culture means in our growing organisation. We started with the problem statement. The main solution was simple: in order to have the same understanding, we need to describe what constitutes positive and negative behaviour at Revolut.

So we started with the most obvious step: getting some understanding of how our culture is perceived. We interviewed about 20 heads of departments/functions, and asked them the same question: “what’s a definition of poor/strong performance in certain values?” That's when it started to get even more interesting. We found that their understanding of values is significantly distant between each other. What’s true for one employer, may not be for all.

We collected input from more than 100 diverse sets of employees during 1:1 interviews, structured workshops sessions, and feedback sessions.

As a result, we came up with a set of 14 behaviours that we expect from everyone in the organisation: www.revolut.com/our-culture.

Apart from the CEO office, we’ve been collaborating on this project with multiple creative department teams to make sure we provide precise and simple definitions as well as way to explain it to everyone.

What are the main insights about Revoluters and the values that you observed within the process?

  • Delivering WOW was the hardest value for people to describe. We’ve heard a lot of statements like: “if I’m not in Product, I can’t deliver WOW”, so we focused on creating behaviours matching all the departments and roles - Put customer first (whether it external or internal) and Keep it simple
  • Two sentences that got my attention, which were repeated many times in my conversations with Revoluters about our work culture, were:
“People who work always get priority over people who talk” (Get it Done)
“It doesn’t matter what your title is, if your idea makes sense, we’ll get all hands on board to make it happen.” (Think Deeper)
  • We discovered that we want to avoid being dogmatic on metrics and focus on company success instead. We’re not fans of the ‘ticking-box' method, we tend to do one thing well (all the way to the end), and then focus on another one. We want to keep focusing on the outcome and simplicity, even on the most complex analysis we need to perform.
  • Some of the powerful expressions we’ve heard during the process were: respectful leadership, becoming a better human, breaking boundaries, and embracing diversity, that we added to some of our value-based behaviours.

How does it resonate with you? If you feel that you’d be a perfect match for our team, we’re always in search of passionate individuals!

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