Revolut's culture: the past, present and the future

People · News · 4 March 2019Nik Storonsky

As many of you will know by now, I've always been the straight talking type, and I've never shied away from taking responsibility when we've gotten something wrong.

Last week, an article surfaced online giving the impression that we have a "toxic culture" and saying that we have high staff turnover. In light of this, I owe it to my team and to our customers to have an open and frank discussion about this.

The point of this open letter is not to make excuses or attempt to rubbish the claims in the article, but to admit that we haven't always gotten things right, and to emphasise that we are not the same company that we were 12-18 months ago, when these mistakes were made.  

Our internal working culture has been evolving as fast as our business, and we have come a long way from where we were before. When I look back at some of our past mistakes, I'm certainly not proud of them, but I am proud of what we have learned along the way, and the direction that we're now heading in.

I'm not in the business of making excuses, but I do hope that this letter provides a little more context and background. I've learnt the hard way that building a high performing startup requires different skillsets and processes, and that what works for five people doesn't for eighty, or eight hundred.

Like everyone else at Revolut, I am constantly learning and growing with the company. I now know that there is much more to running a successful business than simply hitting targets.

Over the last 18 months, we've spent a lot of time working on our culture. We now conduct biannual surveys where we ask our employees what we're doing well and where we need to improve. We've introduced new 360 performance reviews to make them more fair and transparent. We've completely overhauled our on-boarding and off-boarding process to improve employee experience, and we're currently looking for a Head of People & Culture to help take us to new heights.

I'm not going to pretend that we're perfect, but we absolutely want to be. If you look at Revolut today, we've grown from 100 to over 800 people, and I'm proud of the fact that our turnover is now less than 3%, and that we were named as a top three tech company to work for by LinkedIn. I don't mention these things to gloat, but instead to demonstrate how far we have come.

I'm fortunate to be surrounded by an amazingly talented and diverse team, and this experience has reminded me of the importance of making your working culture and values more visible to the outside world. That is why going forward, we will be making a continued effort to promote the Revolut culture and values of today, and transparently sharing our plans around future projects in this area.

We are still on a journey, but I'm incredibly excited to share our plans around culture and wellbeing in the coming weeks.

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