You can’t live off of fruit alone

In your first month, you will most likely already be in touch with colleagues from different locations and countries. This is largely due to our decentralized corporate structure—we are aware that we have a certain “organizational” advantage in the area of diversity. This, however, also affects our identity; our daily work is characterized by cultural openness and international collaboration.

Basically, we are a medium-sized mechanical engineering company—and as you and we know, the industry is not necessarily known for its large female representation. We see ourselves as a bit like a rare bird here, even though we still have a way to go. But which company can claim that its software engineering team has two women at the management level? Us. And we have more examples.

And yet, diversity is more than a simple equation with the variables gender, origin and age. It is the process of dealing with different opinions and approaches in a constructive manner and dealing with them openly.

To turn this phrase into reality, we make sure that our employees fit together but also that they explicitly differ from one another. That's why we use the Hogan test, among other things, to record personality traits as part of the hiring process and also when changes are made within the teams. Not to evaluate personalities, but to put the pieces of a puzzle together.

Technology is our daily business; its reasonable use is our motivation. This is true for both our customers and our everyday way of working.

This doesn't mean we don't have any printers in our office, although they are more and more becoming an ink storage unit. However, you'll rarely find landlines in our facilities. Instead, we are working across borders with the help of collaborative documents, messaging each other on teams without formal salutations, and using agile planning where it makes sense. You can't choose the devices you'll use, but you can be sure that they'll be state-of-the-art.

Okay, that covers our office staff, but what about colleagues that spend their time on the road and/or on site with customers? It's still a long way to go, but we have also completed a part of the journey. We've long since moved beyond the days of being buried under an avalanche of paper. Digital tools for time management, shift planning, and quotations facilitate your and our customers' lives. In a nutshell, we don't just sell modern technology; we are power users ourselves.

Even though we all enjoy not being a large corporation, we do enjoy our decentralized and international set up. We have many locations with different capacities, from logistics and production with more than 100 employees to small sales offices with 2 employees.

This doesn't mean our small offices have to fight on their own. We live in a matrix, which means all employees get the same support and that line managers are available even if they are not in the same time zone.

This global collaboration requires knowledge of English—which we guess you have since you're reading this. We don't need to hear a posh British accent. We just need your courage to collaborate in a (maybe) foreign language. Instead of losing track in this international context and starting with 1,200 different approaches, we have processes, templates and clear responsibilities. In this area, we're glad to have some simplified best practices from the big companies.