Answering the Question: “What is the Culture like at VTS?”

Louisa Petkov, Senior Talent Acquisition Manager at VTS, answers this question.

Usually at the end of every interview the tables turn and interviewers ask “do you have any questions for me?”. At this stage, one of the most common questions is “how would you describe the culture at the company?”. This is a chance to learn more about the company you might be joining - and what could be a better question to ask in order to get a picture of what it’s like to work there?

From someone who is answering this question, culture can be a difficult thing to describe as it is something innately intangible, multifaceted, and permeates pretty much everything about the experience of working there. I break it down into 3 parts to give an idea of our culture at VTS and for candidates to have what they need to learn more about it after we speak.

Company Values

When you boil things down, a company’s culture should be anchored in the values they hold.

As someone who is interviewing, a good place to start is to learn what they are, and to see if they align with your personal values. A company that you will want to join will have values that resonate with you and they will live by them.

There are some signals to pay attention to which speak to this. One is how the interview process is conducted (the process and overall experience), and another is how employees explain their experience working there. From there, you can see if these signals are consistent with the values communicated by the company.

At VTS, our values are what drives us. They are:

We also have our VTS Mindset.Action. Boldness. Resilience. Teamwork.

If our values are our heart, our mindset is how we get things done.

Living these values

We take our values seriously and we know that it’s one thing to say we have these values, the next step is to stand by them in our practices and policies. Another way we do this is by having a dedicatedValues Interviewto ensure new teammates that join are aligned with our values, because the way that we uphold them is through our people and how we work together every day. We also celebrate employees who are exemplary in living our values with bi-monthlyValues Award Winners announced in our company-wide All Hands meeting and are provided with an extra $1,000 to their Learning and Development stipend.

Apart from this, here are a few more examples of how we’ve put each value into action.

Appreciate the difference.We thrive on unique perspectives and experiences. We use them to improve ourselves, our work, and our community.

• We are active in our commitment to DE&I:through partnerships with 15+ Diversity groups and events. Our partnerships can be found on ourcareers page.
• We provide space for our people to connect:through 7 active Employee Resource Groups (ERG’s) you can viewhere. On your first day you are also assigned a VTS buddy outside of your department to have someone to turn to for different perspectives and any VTS questions.
• We don’t leave things to chance:we have a yearly Strategic Diversity and Inclusion Plan (SDIP), and provide training on values interviewing and unconscious bias workshops.
• We check in:through 1-1’s and employee surveys. Our last survey found 91% of employees feel included and accepted at VTS.

Move as one.Collaboration is essential. We operate as one team with a shared mission.

• Growth is everyone’s responsibility:feedback is a continuous process at VTS, and we alsohave dedicated time to review performance and goals such as 360° reviews twice a year, yearly Mentorship programs, as well as ongoing and regular 1-1’s to ensure you are on track. We expect people to be proactive in soliciting feedback if they need it to get clarity or to move forward so that we can provide that support or have the appropriate conversations.
• We are a team:We don’t work in silos. Many of our company initiatives are cross departmental with shared OKRs to hold everyone accountable for their individual parts of the project. Within product and engineering, we operate in an agile development modelso that we have a people-centric approach in our process and the development of our products.

Take ownership.We are bold in our actions and accountable for the results.

• You are a trusted member from day one:We will give you responsibility and trust you to be accountable, as well as recognized, for your results - no matter your tenure or level.
• We make your growth path clear:Many departments have aCareer Ladderin order to define the competencies expected of different levels of a role. Removing ambiguity helps you understand where you are in your career at VTS, and what the next steps are to develop skills that will get the results you are looking for.
• We listen to you:We aim to align your professional development at VTS with your career goals, so when you join you are not limited to one path. There are career tracks for individual contributors to develop their skills, as well as paths for leadership.

Be curious.Curiosity fuels our growth. We seek opportunities to teach as well as to learn.

• Learning and development stipends:we provide monetary resources for you to use towards developing professional and personal skills or interests at your own pace.
• Internal VTS Academy:we have our internal learning platform where employees can learn more about, or brush up on, our products, departments, and processes.
• We learn from each other: we do this by first creating psychological safety, as well as opportunities for formal and informal feedback, workshopping, and methods like channels or guilds for sharing ideas or information.

Be customer obsessed.We're committed to making our customers smarter and faster. When they succeed, we succeed.

We revolve our strategic decisions around customer outcomes, listen closely to our customers and take feedback seriously. We have compassion and empathy for our customers and make sure they feel it, we dig in and ask good questions.

• For Sales and customer-facing teams, this means identifying the customer outcomes our software needs to deliver and revolving our entire sales process around that truth.
• For Product and Engineering,this means having an outcome driven product development process and not a feature driven product development process.

Strive for excellence.Through constant innovation and iteration, we get better everyday.

You can see that in how we interact with our customers and build product. Hear more about this from our leaders in Client Success & Sales below:

Ryan Sprouls - Senior Manager, Client Success:

“We are the voice of the customer. We become a part of the client’s business to understand their pain points. We look to maximize the value of our product for our clients and are there to work cross functionally to make sure that is achieved at every stage of their life cycle. Because when our client’s succeed, we succeed.”

Jasprit Gupta - Senior Manager, Support:

“We help property teams activate their commercial real estate spaces and engage their tenants, resulting in real-time tenant insights. We empower and guide property, marketing, and operations teams to optimize their use of the VTS Tenex Platform for building communications, events, and operations to create a seamless tenant in-office experience. We continually provide product updates and recommendations as well and work within the business to highlight client product feedback, so that property teams can continue to evolve their tenant engagement program to positively influence retaining and attracting tenants.”

Eric Doran - VP of Sales:

“We pride ourselves on knowing our customers and the industry well in order to propose a thoughtful and strategic solution for them. We want to make sure that we are speaking to them in a way that makes sense to them and is relevant to the day-to-day challenges that they are facing. We anchor everything we do in data and that is what we’re driving solutions from in order to be experts and part of the change management of the implementation of solutions across an organization.”

Sean Weinhouse - VP of Customer Success:

“We are constantly improving our revenue team’s ability to guide an evaluation and deliver the ideal solution for our clients’ challenges. While this innovation happens gradually throughout the year, we make a concerted effort at the beginning of each quarter to run internal workshops and training to ensure the entire revenue team is consistent and on brand. Additionally, we thoroughly measure how successful our team is by tracking revenue targets and collecting anecdotal feedback from our clients. We do our best to fail fast and course correct through better processes, messaging or collateral.”

You can see it in the how we treat our people

We look for new ways to support our people.

• In 2022 we introduced a phased return to work program, which allows full-time primary caregivers to work 60% of their workweek at 100% pay for up to the first four weeks following their return from paid parental leave.

We celebrate our people.

• We spotlight our Values Award winners and provide them with extra funds towards their learning and development stipend.
• We amplify our employee’s voices on platforms like our LinkedIn Life page & InHersight.

You can do this from different sources. One way is from the interview process by asking people about their experiences, their challenges, and how they have been supported in their career & personal growth.

Hear directly from our people

Another way is through reading our content where you can hear from different voices at VTS. We have multiple channels which you can peruse below where people talk about topics like their professional journey, as well as their teams, projects, and experiences.

• VTS Blog- check out our #WeAreVTS series
• LinkedIn Life Page -  check out our Who we Are page and our different teams 

The sources above are places where we try to give people a look into what life is like at VTS, and also to spotlight our employees - we are proud of our people and want to recognize them and all that they do! Will we see you here next? :)