The culture as a whole

We believe that when we meet our surroundings with kindness and decency, it attracts colleagues, customers, and partners with the same mindset. And when good people meet, extraordinary collaborations are created, which provide healthy business for all parties.

This creates a self-reinforcing balance, where kindness leads to healthy business, and healthy business creates a foundation for more kindness. We think this is just common sense.

“Goodness is, in reality, simply the headline for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We believe that, as a company, you should choose the category you impact the most in your value chain and then focus on addressing it with the future in mind—for Morningtrain, that category is the labour market, as we are a people business.”

Thomas Østerkjerhuus, CEO, Morningtrain ApS

What if every day was a party?

At Morningtrain, we do not cut down trees, extract cobalt, or pollute wastewater.. instead, we consume labour market resources. And although the former topics are important, we want to make an effort where we can have the greatest impact.

When we commit to “contributing goodness”, we translate that into creating the workplaces of the future—building a culture based on meaning and on enjoying going to work. That is our shared goal, and that is meaningful to us.

Morningtrain is fundamentally built on a desire to be a great place to come to work, which has fostered an internal mantra at Morningtrain that goes:

“What if we always had some form of party?”

The mantra is about creating a challenging and fun everyday life for our colleagues, which provides a fantastic foundation for well-being and self-development for everyone on the team.

This vision obligates us to have supportive behavior in everyday life.

Initiatives to Create Colleagues in Balance in Everyday Life

• Our coaching programme is designed to support a day-to-day where we do not simply solve colleagues’ challenges for them, but instead give them the tools to solve them themselves.
• Our paid sports during working hours are intended to promote physical wellbeing among our colleagues.
• We have Morningclubs with social activities in the form of clubs, where you can pursue a sport or hobby together with your colleagues.
• We have clarified our colleagues’ personality profiles in the form of LEGO bricks. This makes it easier to understand your colleagues and their reaction patterns.

• Encouragement to take power breaks: When you need a break, take a break. Play table tennis, go for a walk, play PlayStation, take a nap, or have a cosy chat in the lounge. Breaks are not scheduled, counted, or anything like that. As long as you deliver your work on time, take the breaks you need, when you need them.

• You manage your own workday within the established framework, as long as it does not compromise the quality of your work or collaboration with your colleagues, and as long as it does not have financial negative consequences.

The tool to reach the goal

The mission below contains the ingredients for how we will achieve our vision of building the good workplaces of the future.

There are many ways to interpret ‘a healthy culture’ or what ‘kindness’ is. So to provide a common ground, we have written our mission as a kind of “recipe” to be followed closely. The mission also tells us which management levers we use and what needs to be in play before we can say that we have succeeded.

The order is not random, and all words are carefully chosen. There are clear contrasts built in, which often can seem like “opposites” to each other, but we have included them in our overall mission to give a nuanced picture of what needs to be considered on both sides of a scale in balance.

Below, we have deciphered our mission so you can taste the love for the words and exactly what we mean by them in our context.

Culture first

The first part of the mission is:

Culture comes first because it is our primary tool. When we want to change something, whether it’s behavior, economics, or something else entirely, we start here.

So, when you look to the mission for tools to achieve the vision, you are reminded that at Morningtrain, this is where you start.

Self-management and Relationships

We continue with:

Both ‘self-management’ and ‘relationships’ are two words that are easy to subscribe to, but for us, they are commitments, and they both require a lot and can stand in contrast to each other.

When we work with self-management, we call it; “being a director at your own desk”.
But we don’t want all our colleagues to be so much into themselves that they forget about others (the relationships).

Being completely self-driven requires:

• A high level of consciousness
• The ability to give feedback
• Knowing your domains and roles
• Taking great responsibility and knowing your responsibilities

Relationships are written into the mission because we must never underestimate how far strong relationships have carried Morningtrain over the years. Therefore, they must not be forgotten when we make decisions.

That we want to focus on relationships answers, for example:

• Whether we should have a dial menu when calling us or just have a human on the line (duh – dial menus are not helpful).
• Whether we prefer physical meetings or virtual meetings.
• Whether we want a remote culture where only a few colleagues come into the office during the week.
• Whether we should do more to pamper existing customers rather than getting new ones.

And the list goes on..

A long-term and sustainable interaction

The sentence “…in perfect balance with efficiency and talent development…” tells us that we of course focus on being efficient, but it’s okay to slack on efficiency in the short term if we need to become smarter or learn something new.

The point is not to translate “Kindness” in the vision to “okay so everything is free”. It translates more to the fact that we are sometimes less profitable because we need/want to improve our skills, and that it is a consciously made choice.

At the same time, talent development must not be forgotten in the eternal pursuit of increased efficiency in the short term. Without both, we do not have a sustainable and self-reinforcing balance in the long term.

“Perfectly balanced, as all things should be”

Thanos the mad titan – Marvel cinematic universe

Our approach and area of work

The above interaction allows us to fulfill the next part of the mission:

And no, it’s not (just) sales talk. 😉

The word ‘effective‘ tells about the promise we approach tasks with. Before you can say whether something was effective or not, you need to know:

• What do you want to move?
• How do you know if it succeeds?

This is a unique approach that we have internally and with our customers. You will always be asked:

“What are we trying to solve, and how do we know that we have solved it?”

Only with the above mindset can we ensure that the conceived solution solves the right problem and in the right way.

At the same time, “extraordinary digital solutions” tells about our primary playing field – the digital – and that we expect of ourselves that we can go beyond the expected through ongoing investments in developing ourselves and our talents.

Start with the Customer, then the Numbers in the Excel Sheet Will also Work Out

The mission concludes with:

This serves as a reminder of who we are here for. When we create solutions, the success criterion is not to impress an owner group, management, or one’s colleagues.

It must create value for the customer who pays for the solution—and if you focus exclusively on customer value, it will automatically also create value for Morningtrain.

We think this is just common sense.

The values are guests in our house

At Morningtrain, we view and treat values as guests in the house. We choose them and invite them in, but they do not necessarily stay forever.

We revisit our values every 4-5 years and taste whether it’s the same set of values that best continues to move us towards our vision.

The point is that as an organization develops, different focuses will come into play, where new values become more relevant than the current ones. This means that we have continuously over the years shifted focus from some values to others – depending on what the organization needed.

There will always be more values living in an organization than the few that are selected to be on the wall. The task is managerially to focus on the few that best bring us closer to the vision.

Thomas Østerkjerhuus, CEO, Morningtrain ApS

When a focus value is replaced, it’s not because we shouldn’t live the old value anymore. It’s more often about this value living in the best well-being on the backbone of the critical mass, so we don’t need the sharpened focus on it anymore, or because the old value is not as crucial anymore.

Let us introduce: SATS

Morningtrain ApS’s set of values has been given the cheeky acronym SATS, which makes it a bit easier for all employees to remember the values. It is a small communication trick that rhymes and jingles are easier to remember.

In addition, we SATS on our colleagues and our culture, and we ask people to SATS on themselves. If we are to succeed together, we must dare together.

However, it is quite important to us that our values are actually lived—and not just written on the wall in our canteen. That is why we have implemented several initiatives to ensure our values are understood and lived.

Among these:

• Monthly value barometer meetings where different situations are discussed. This may be because something has gone really well—or perhaps completely off track.
  Here, the incident is analyzed and processed in plenary by the team involved, focusing on how the values have been in play (or not) to give a common understanding of a shared set of values.
• Feedback routine, where colleagues provide “maintain” or “develop” feedback, following the correct formula, so it does not become mere information or criticism.
  Feedback must be loving, concrete, and constructive. Thus, we have provided all colleagues with a tool for conducting genuine and honest communication with each other. Because everyone knows the same format, we require each person to take responsibility for giving feedback to colleagues rather than letting conversations happen behind the scenes.
• Luxafor lamps that signal when one doesn’t want to be disturbed because they are concentrating or in the middle of a creative process that requires peace. It’s an important part of good collaboration that we know when we can approach people and when it’s a disturbance.
• Check-in and check-out routine where in a meeting one can “check in” and “check out”, telling what they bring to the meeting and what their expectations are, etc.
  It builds trust when people know where others are coming from. At the same time, it’s part of self-renewal that one generally has a higher self-awareness about what they bring into the room – and how it can affect the room and decisions.
• Domains and roles come before titles, which means that colleagues have full autonomy within their respective domains. We decided this to increase accountability in the office.
  Because if colleagues are to take responsibility, they also need to know what they’re responsible for – and they should be allowed to make decisions autonomously. With our structure, it’s competence and not hierarchy that dictates decisions.

In 2010, four young entrepreneurs travelled to the USA to build a software platform for radio stations. The project did not succeed, and they returned home with debt—but also with the important realisation that they wanted to continue together. That became Morningtrain.

The direction was shaped by the people and the interplay between them, and the ambition was to create a place where you thrive, develop, and solve tomorrow’s tasks together.

Month after month, and later year after year, Morningtrain gradually grew and began to take shape as a digital agency with expertise in digital customer journeys.

Over time, Morningtrain also became a preferred place for digital specialists who wanted to be part of a strong professional and social community.

And the community is at the core of Morningtrain.

Nurturing the community is synonymous with the desire to cultivate the long term, lasting relationships, strong values, and a healthy culture.

Morningtrain is not here to “beat anyone”. We simply want to still be here in 100 years and stand as a shining example of what can happen when we are together about tomorrow.

The most skilled person for the job has the domain

We have always had a competence hierarchy, which we have tried to refine the framework for over the years to ensure that the most skilled person in an area also gets a corresponding decision-making mandate.

This doesn’t mean in the traditional sense that the most skilled production employee gets promoted to production manager. Instead, it means that we have defined that leadership comes in many sizes and forms:

• Personnel management
• Leader management
• Professional management
• Business operations

Each of the four above requires different competencies. It also means that we have decentralized leadership by assigning several different roles to “domains”, so more people can carry their part of a total management and decision-making responsibility.

In this way, we ensure that colleagues who need to lead other colleagues are skilled personnel managers, while technically experienced colleagues make technical decisions, etc.

We must not take the person most skilled at a piece of work and make that person a poor leader for those who now have to do the job.

Peter Thomsen, COO, Morningtrain ApS

The Structure and Domains in Broad Terms

Insane—you have now read roughly 3,500 words about our shared love story with Morningtrain, much of which has been us praising ourselves. THANK YOU for reading along.
You deserve some love 🧡🧡🧡