Values: You Are What You Eat

It’s a big old world. 24,901 miles around the equatorial circumference, to be precise. Yet, in the digital age, it’s perfectly possible for someone in Anchorage, Alaska to work with a company in Zanzibar (8,606 miles), or for a corporation in Auckland, NZ to partner with a design agency in Zion, Illinois (8,189 miles). If the last few years have taught us anything, they’ve shown us that distance need not be a barrier to effective collaboration.

But this greater reach brings greater complexity. With the global population now in excess of 8 billion people, how on earth can you be sure that you’re working with the right people? We now have easy access to so much content that it can be impossible to sift the wheat from the chaff, to know left from right, up from down, or right from wrong. We’re data rich, but information poor. Was that thing you’re reading written by someone who was well-informed, by a content farm troll or perhaps just conjured out of thin air by a computer? Without wishing to be too philosophical, what is truth?

"Our values are not just words, they are the beating heart of who we are: at Housing Online, we all try to stand by our values in the way that we work, in the products that we deliver and in the way that we interact with others."

Housing Online is a small company. We have a good track record of solving digital problems for our customers and we think that the quality and value of our work speaks for itself. You don’t just have to take our word for that, you can ask any of our customers.

Of course, we would say that. Every company on the internet says that sort of thing all the time, that doesn’t make it true. Every soulless multinational corporation bangs on endlessly about their values too, as if that actually meant something. They’re just more empty words on the World Wide Web; no one ever takes them seriously, do they? As long as the output is okay, who really cares anyway?

Well, here’s something you might not hear very often: at Housing Online, we really do try to live by our values, and we believe that there’s a lot more to us than just the quality of our work. Of course we are proud of the work that we do and the relationships that we build with our customers, but we also believe that we are defined every bit as much by our values and by the way that we do business as we are by the work itself.

Did we just say that out loud? That our values and the way we do business are at least as important as the work we actually do? Really?

As a company and as individuals, we think that we have a responsibility to try to be as ethical as we can be. We believe in treating other people, whether customers, suppliers or members of our team, the way that we would want to be treated ourselves. We want to tread lightly and to help our customers create products that are inclusive, accessible and sustainable. These are the values that represent us.

Our values are not just words, they are the beating heart of who we are: every member of our team at Housing Online tries to stand by our values in the way that we work, in the products that we deliver and in the way that we interact with others.

Sounds too good to be true? Try us. You might be surprised.

Photo by Amanda Flavell on Unsplash