Sterblue Blog

Startup

Stuck at home in a shaken world - How we have accelerated our work organization transformation at Sterblue

This crisis highlighted the fact that we are just human beings living on one single planet where we cannot control everything all the time. We can at most limit the crisis’ consequences.

This rough period gave us the opportunity to spend time with our relatives, experience a new work organization and think about our role and impact on this planet. A strong “meaning” in our daily work lives is now more than ever a “Must Have”. It all starts with the company mission. 

At Sterblue, we build the central platform for infrastructure inspection. We have started with energy assets and drone imagery. We digitize large asset operators' workflows in order to improve drastically energy efficiency and avoid asset failure causing catastrophic events (Wildfires caused by PG&E in 2018 and 2019 released the equivalent of yearly Californian production of CO2). Our vision is to sync the real world with its digital twin. 

Another part of this “meaning” are Sterblue’s values and how we have them live. Last year we wrote an article highlighting them: Be Bold, Be Smart, Play as a Team, and Exceed Expectations. But our culture is not only built with words (we hope not!). After these tough times we have decided to launch and enhance a series of initiatives that intend to give life to the mentioned values (and sorry, still no plan to set up a ping-pong table in our offices!):

  1. Remote friendly: 80% “Work from Anywhere” possible. We request our employees to be at one of our offices 2 days every 2 weeks. If you count, it means people can work more than 3 weeks in a row from wherever they want. 
  2. Hot week time: we set up a quick poll every week to evaluate the people who are going to the office and maximize real interactions.
  3. Random casual time (remote or in person): Twice a week, 4 people randomly chosen for a 15 min coffee break. Twice a week, 2 people randomly chosen for a 45 min lunch.
  4. Discover and work together from a cool place:  When at least 4 people from Sterblue want to work from another cool place (a European capital like Berlin or near the beach in south of Spain for example) for 1-2 weeks, we support them with a €500 check / person.
  5. Participation in sport events: We support up to €150 / person (minimum 3 people participating) twice a year to participate in sport events (surf, marathon, mountain bike contest, etc). 
  6. Discover new horizons with thriving speakers: Once every quarter, we bring an outstanding speaker to share with the Sterblue Team.
  7. Time for research papers: We allocate time so that our employees can write research papers and we encourage them to participate in some technical conferences.
  8. 100% local transportation system reimbursed: to facilitate the transportation challenges.
  9. Exchange Sterblue employees with other thriving startups: to encourage discovery from 3 to 6 months.
  10. HR and financial transparency: We enhance our bi-monthly meeting with even more transparent information to build trust in our mission (unified dashboard, salary grid, explained financial information, etc).

If you want to work at Sterblue, apply now to our job openings here!