News in the Channel – February 2023

Pax8 PROFILE

But Chloe is careful to point out that while the company drives towards psychological safety for employees, it doesn’t mean they are afraid to have difficult conversations when necessary. “You need to know if the experiment has failed, but you need to create the safety,” she says. “It’s not ‘you failed’, it’s that the hypothesis was wrong, and we’ve learned something and now we try something else.” Living it Phylip adds: “Pax8’s values of advocate, innovate, celebrate and elevate are things that we live. “We all love what we do, and while we work hard, we also work smart. We don’t want people to get burnt out, so we call out people that are working crazy hours. We live these values of a great life work balance, noting it’s that way around: you got a life first and you happen to work here. So that’s the way that we approach it. The big thing for us is that we live these values. In 1985, Peter Drucker [late Austrian-American management consultant] uttered his famous phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. It’s about time we all lived it as organisations. “We’re passionate about the soft skills of business and the hard skills. We can talk about the hard things like strategy, execution and cash, but equally important, if we believe that culture eats strategy for breakfast, are the soft things of culture cohesion and the human element.” Chloe says that human element is something that her team obsess over and are constantly seeking feedback on and question to ensure they are still getting it right, and how the culture and working environment can be improved. “While we have an amazing team of engineers who are constantly innovating on the platform, an amazing team who are constantly in the channel community, speaking to partners, finding out how we can serve them better, our mission in the people operations team is to make Pax8 the best place to work,” she says. “While Phylip’s team are promoting this world’s best marketplace, I’m trying to build the world’s best company to work for.” Getting the right fit This ideal extends to recruitment. “We don’t hire for culture fit, we hire for

Chloe Cameron chief people officer, EMEA Pax8

collaboration and empowering them to do their best work.” Chloe adds that this means building up large amounts of trust and psychological safety in the workplace. “Whenever anyone walks through the door, their trust bucket is full,” she says. “Trust is something you receive from day one. That’s really important because I want employees to tell me everything that’s weird or wrong or broken or why on earth do you do it that way? There’s no ‘well, once I pass my probation, then I can give you my list of recommendations for improvement’. That’s not how we do things here. “It is not just the culture where we make it safe to speak up, but operationally, we try to avoid burdensome processes and layers of approval. One of our key statements is forgiveness, not permission. “We do have rules and procedures around the things that really matter. But what is fundamental to us is that we hire adults, we trust them, you cannot have a genuine culture of innovation if you don’t have psychological safety. Not only does it make it an unpleasant place for people to work and it can damage your company, as your ability to service your customers is compromised because you’re stifling what is the lifeblood of any technology business, which is our ability to make changes and adapt to the marketplace.” Phylip adds that it is all about correcting rather than punishing when something doesn’t work. “At Pax8 we say, ‘what do we reward and what do we correct?’ I want to be correct. If something’s wrong, I want it brought to my attention and it can help me be better tomorrow.”

While Phylip’s team are promoting this world’s best marketplace, I’m trying to build the world’s best company to work for. “

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