What comes to your mind when you hear the “Corporate culture” concept? Most people imagine it as a desirable workplace — with ping-pong tables, happy hours, free cookies and cushy benefits, right? But how to create a great culture when your team works remotely? Delicious cookies in the office kitchen are great, but is it the key to strong company culture?

“We want to become a hope for those who need it most.”

This phrase is a milestone of the creation of the Nozomi Health corporate culture with the goal of becoming something more than just a team of designers and developers…

Nozomi is a digital health product company that creates solutions for people to feel better. We’re focused on bringing impact, the right emotions and values with unique products.

Everything we do in our corporate culture aims to promote our values and vision within the company.

There’s one notion that Nozomi perfectly manifests — transparency. A culture of openness where nothing is hidden and every problem — big or small — deserves to be discussed.

All team members know what’s happening inside the company, even if there are some complications. To reinforce our values, we have weekly updates by email from our CEO-Max. It helps our team to be up to date with everything that is going on in Nozomi Health, to know what the plans are, how each department is performing and its current KPIs, and most importantly — to better understand the company’s mission and values.

We have a Bi-weekly “Nozomba News” to keep our team members fully engaged. It is an amusing newspaper with previous and upcoming events, project updates, book recommendations, local memes and many other Nozomi news. 🙂

You’re probably wondering how to subscribe to the newspaper, aren’t you? Sorry, it’s only for Nozombas! Okay, I can show you one of the covers…

Another value of Nozomi Health is a partnership. We create trustful and respectful relations between people. Only in this way can great products be made.

Each team member is essential and directly impacts the company’s development; they can offer any idea and even discuss it with the CEO face to face. It fosters an environment where everyone is heard without feeling like another cog in the machine.

To enrich our company culture and build a solid and transparent relationship between all our members, we use the recognition system Bonusly (no, they didn’t pay us for advertising😁).

Every month our team gets an allowance to give their peers bonuses to celebrate their contributions. With Bonusly, everyone in the company can publicly recognise a person by giving them some bonuses. With the bonuses accrued, we can exchange them for meaningful rewards in Nozomi Shop. It helps every team member feel that their work is valued and they are appreciated. Only if there are trustful and respectful relations can great products be created.

We all spend most of our life at work, so it’s crucial for us to manage the environment we work in. We try to make the working process enjoyable and not stressful and help everyone feel that they work with friends, not strangers.

Fostering solid and true connections when you have teammates that you have never seen face-to-face is a big challenge, but we try to make it possible by creating fun initiatives and energizing close digital communication.

Monthly Workshops. One of our central values is always seeking new bits of knowledge. Thus, we have an event that gathers us together and can be held absolutely by everyone on any topic. Each member has the opportunity to share their experience and try their public speaking skills in front of the team. For example, we’ve already had workshops on “How to tackle tasks we hate”, “Monetisation in the AppStore”, “Organization for dummies”, “What to do in case of a nuclear explosion”, and so on…

Nozomi Health tournament. Every quarter we hold the Nozomi Health Tournament and play different online games with the whole team. After several gaming days, winners are determined and receive cool custom prizes from the company. It helps us create an informal atmosphere to communicate with the team. The photo below shows the winners of our previous game, “Among us”. They have got custom prizes such as hoodies, t-shirts and lovely socks.

Of course, not only online events are arranged. A few times in the quarter, we have teambuildings and spend time together somewhere outside. The last one was held at a place by the water. Guess where? No, unfortunately, not the Maldives this time, but also fine — wakeboarding and chilling on the beach. There was such nice weather; actually, now we plan to do this more often.

Besides that, Nozomi Health has a tradition of quarterly organising an “All hands” event. We have this meeting to highlight our quarter successes and show appreciation to the team and each person who contributed to the company’s projects and culture development.

After this, we always head to an after-party in some bar to celebrate and get to know each team member better.

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to bring all our team together in one place because of remote work. Still, even for this case, we have Corporate gatherings one or two times a year, for which we rent a huge cottage to live in for a week, bringing our all team together and spending time with our teammates.

We strive to build a community and a culture that holds the team together, no matter where they physically are.

At the end we would like to quote Simon Sinek’s book: “All organisations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.”

We will do everything to keep our ‘WHY’ as long as we can.