Dec 6, 2017
Pipedrive Response
7yPipedrive has been growing rapidly and this has resulted in somewhat overcrowded offices. Fortunately our people in Lisbon already moved to a larger space, people in Tallinn offices will get bigger and better working conditions in a year’s time. Loud chit chats in open spaces are not excusable and we will address this issue.
As to the perception that only Estonians are considered for roles or promotions - we would like to share some facts that should bring clarity to that issue. Yes, there are more Estonians working at Pipedrive Estonian offices than people from other nationalities (the ratio is 74 to 26 %), the same applies to our other offices: there are mainly Portuguese working at Pipedrive Lisbon office and Americans in our New York office. Out of the total number of promotions that were received at Pipedrive in 2017, 59% were received by people working in Tallinn and Tartu offices in Estonia: 23% were given to Estonians and 36% to people of other nationalities. We will also try to cover this issue at our following company all hands meetings to avoid it remaining the talk of the “smoking corner”.
It is difficult to understand what the accusation of people working around 4-6 hours is based upon. Modern technology, mobile devices have freed us from staying in one physical place to complete a task. In our job adds we say that we offer flexible work environment and hours, but that does not mean that people work less than 8 hours a day. Those who need to leave earlier than 6PM due to family arrangements (pick up kids, drop off kids) are expected to continue working from home. Sometimes people leave the office earlier to take the 7PM call with co-workers in a different time zone at home to avoid staying at the office until 8 or 9PM and to have an early dinner. We hire based on character and we are very specific about the fit - we look for people whose motivation comes from a deep emotional connection to their work; we also believe that working hours or the results cannot be and should not be defined by how many hours people spend in the office. If there are team members who are unreachable and thus hinder others to do their job, this should be brought to the manager and be solved accordingly.
Pipedrive will continue to be open and transparent and we will continue to ask for opinions from our employees because considering different suggestions and aspects will improve the quality of our decisions. Anyone expressing their opinion about the direction the company should take, is heard. Whether the company actually takes that direction is dependent on many other factors and variables, but people who have given their opinion should be proud because they have contributed to the overall decision-making process.
As to using Macs. This is our preferred operating system and the company has decided to use Apple products for the standardised hardware platform which provides a trustworthy workhorse for everyday duties. Some teams also benefit from using Apple platform, for example our design team uses Sketch, a strictly Mac oriented application. For dev teams it’s easier to use OS X, for it contains Terminal and all Unix based tools that our devs need and love. Macs are also continually shown to suffer less attacks than Windows-based PCs, the components are optimised for performance and to require less power and the screens are known for their anti-reflective coatings.
People are our most important asset. We wish the author would consider turning to HR for us to better address the issues at hand, especially exchanging additional benefits to a reviewed salary. We look at feedback from our employees as input that we can use to improve.
PS! We owe you an apology - we had the reply ready early this year but have seem to have forgotten to post it, we're sincerely sorry about it