A perpetual learning culture

At the same time, many of today’s new demands require novel skills, agile working styles, and an evolving perspective on the future of work. To maintain business continuity throughout such rapid technological changes, organizations need to foster a culture of perpetual learning.

Our own journey of perpetual learning is driven by our company’s DNA and growth mindset. At Schuberg Philis, the resulting organization is one whose colleagues seek out new paths and tread them with confidence. Backed by the support of a perpetual learning culture, we feel safe to step out of our comfort zones, daring to think differently and challenge the status quo as we guide our customers toward sustainable business progress. From our two decades of experience, we know that a willingness to venture into unknown territory takes courage; we have also seen, time and again, how that courage plants the seeds for success and staying ahead of the competition.

Learning to empower our customers’ business

Schuberg Philis’s trinity for value delivery, as we call it, comprises three value proposition cornerstones: ensuring that each and every project is built up by a dedicated customer team, a distinctive way of working based on best practices for everything, and reusable digital components. This trinity reflects our belief that the right people in the right setting can achieve anything.

We strive to understand our customers’ business from the inside out. For example, our teams may visit a beverage company’s bottling plant to experience firsthand what their shop-floor operators need on the production line. Or they might go to a grocery store’s distribution center to observe how order processing is managed. They could also find themselves talking to traders at an energy supplier’s headquarters about how to better serve the industry amidst its ever-changing supply sources and sustainability goals. In other words, our teams fulfill their intellectual curiosity by engaging hands-on with whatever subject matters most to our customers.

Our trademark way of working supports customers in fully owning their solutions and all the new knowledge that comes with them. Working with us offers significant premium value as we strive to enable everyone within the organization to grasp and apply new knowledge. To this end, we offer training to our customers’ employees – specifically to their own trainers and leaders, hoping that the fruits of our teachings can multiply and blossom into self-sufficiency. We also urge customers to uphold the same uncompromised quality that we do, raising standards within the entire organization. For example, we ensure that most digital hygiene processes are automated and frictionless, allowing teams to work cohesively and flawlessly. This liberates engineers from firefighting mode to instead learn more about the business that is critical to their enterprise. From the shop floor to the top floor, this kind of cultural recalibration leads to making digital transformations possible and sustainable.

A notable lesson we have learned in conducting digital transformations is that changing people’s behavior is harder than changing technology. That is why our consistent aim is to work as smartly and efficiently as possible, building on all the knowledge, expertise, and value that has already been acquired and validated. Teams are also encouraged to take similar best-practice approaches within the organization to avoid the investment of new energy and resources in repeatedly inventing the wheel. However, because we thoughtfully select the customers we work with – preferring those whose mission, vision, and purpose to pursue tech for good align with ours – we tend to enjoy a natural cultural fit. The ultimate goal is always to share in the satisfaction of our customer’s progress, enabled by our joint desire to learn and grow as we empower their business to generate sustainable value.

Expert learners, happy colleagues

At Schuberg Philis, learning is tied to our deep culture of engineering. We want all our colleagues, the non-engineers included, to thrive as they practice their craft. Unburdened by the pressure of margins or sales, they can keep refining the expertise they were hired for and take the lead when a project demands the very skills they excel at.

Our greatest organizational impact comes from the technical craftsmanship of our engineers, whose collective expertise is in translating business problems into concrete technical solutions. To carry out that translation, we work with an open mindset, multiple perspectives that help us trigger each other, and a dedication to problem-solving, constant improvement, and creative experimentation.

Psychological safety is fundamental to learning, so we have cultivated a climate where, because we’re always learning, there are no failed experiments. Sometimes, however, we will choose to experiment on a different day so as to deliver on our commitment to guarantee that we always do what’s right for our customers.

Taking pride in doing the right thing

Within the bounds of our culture, quality prevails above all else. For us, doing the right thing should be the easiest thing to do. That’s why our engineers have the freedom and the responsibility to make their own choices about which technology to use, how to use it, and what is best to reuse, reinvent, or learn anew. That said, even as we experience top-down encouragement to master craftsmanship, our company equally nurtures a growth mindset bottom-up. Although we hire those in the highest caliber of their field of expertise, our new colleagues are motivated to learn and explore not by their title or salary bracket, but through the impact they can make both on the job and off.

At Schuberg Philis, personal development happens organically as the result of working within an organization that seeks to raise the industry standards. We invest daily in education, training, and documenting our way of working so we can retain, develop, and spread that knowledge within and beyond our own company. In short, our work ethic supports the growth of our company as much as that of our colleagues.

Because our colleagues are the type of people who want to be the best in the industry, their natural drive leads them to deliver the best in the industry. By being present from the first point of contact with a customer and staying responsible for the full plan-build-run trajectory of any project, each customer team member gets to know the full context for the customer’s digital transformation and feel responsible for its end result. This means that the entire team learns about – and commits to – supporting our customer’s business goals. In this kind of strategic partnership, teams consistently focus on what is instrumental to their holistic success. Every day, they also learn from one another in an environment where peers share the same attitude and commitment. Working alongside fellow craftspeople makes it feel safe to try new things and sometimes fail, though this is precisely what makes our learning curves high.

Continuous probing and progressing

Perpetual learning is hard. It takes focus, well-considered action, and sensitivity to quickly react to the effects of a complex sociotechnical system. This leads to evolving learning practices whose very content is subject to swift evolution. To keep up, we continuously probe, sense, and respond to the many intersections of technology and society.

As a company, we are committed to understanding our customers’ businesses. This means that as individuals, we must always keep learning about the technical operations of their mission-critical processes, the security and regulatory compliance demands that affect them, and how their users and consumers experience all of the above. Sometimes we must deep-dive into emerging technologies – even if they are not yet suitable for our customers – simply because we want to be able to deploy them securely and effectively as soon as they are.

Staying in this proactive, learning-focused mode requires efforts from everyone within our organization and across our partnerships, but it always proves worthwhile. What’s more, for our engineer-minded community of practice, it’s also very often fun. And no doubt it is imperative for delivering the mission-critical IT that we provide to the Netherlands’ most vital industries. Anything that is mission-critical leaves no room for error, so if we are to guarantee 100% uptime for our customers, we must commit 100% to a culture of perpetual learning.