Building the Kind of Company We’d Want to Work For

There is something interesting about getting the opportunity to build a company from the beginning.

You inherit less than you think.

There is no rule that says the working week has to look a certain way, that productivity needs to be visible to count, or that the best ideas are produced between particular hours in a particular room. There is no reason to carry every convention of traditional work culture into a new company simply because that is how work has always been done.

So while we have been building MOK’HOUSE, we have also been thinking about the kind of company we actually want it to become.

Not only the work we want to put into the world, but what it should feel like for the people making it.

Because if we are going to spend an enormous part of our lives building something, we would quite like it to be somewhere we would want to work too.

Good culture is not the stuff around the work

Workplace culture has become one of those phrases that can mean almost anything.

It can mean Friday drinks. A beautiful office. Team lunches. A set of company values written carefully enough to sound good on a careers page.

None of those things are necessarily bad, but they are not culture on their own.

Culture is much harder to manufacture because it lives in the ordinary moments. It is how people are spoken to when something goes wrong, how much trust exists when nobody is watching, whether somebody feels comfortable saying they disagree and whether the rules a company talks about publicly resemble the way people are actually expected to behave privately.

It is whether someone can have a difficult week without feeling as though their entire professional value has changed.

It is whether being busy is treated as evidence of being important.

It is whether people are rewarded for producing good work or for performing the appearance of work.

Those things are less visible than an office kitchen stocked with expensive snacks, but they probably tell you considerably more about the company.

We care about the work, not where you were sitting when you made it

A lot of the people behind MOK’HOUSE genuinely like working from home.

We like being able to build a day around the work rather than building the work around an arbitrary schedule. Some of us think better first thing in the morning. Some will disappear into something for hours and resurface when it is finished. If we need to be together, we get together. And when we do, we would often rather meet somewhere we actually want to be than sit in an office simply because that is where meetings are traditionally held.

None of that means we work less.

If anything, removing the performance around work often leaves more room for the work itself.

There is a strange assumption that flexibility must come at the expense of ambition, as though working from home, setting your own schedule or stepping away in the middle of the day means somebody is less committed. We have found the opposite can be true. When people are trusted to understand when and how they work best, they can become incredibly protective of the quality of what they produce.

We work hard because we care about what we are making. There are days when that means finishing early because the job is done, and others when somebody is still completely absorbed in an idea long after a traditional working day would have ended. Neither should be treated as evidence of commitment on its own.

The goal is not to work for the longest amount of time.

It is to use the time well.

We are much more interested in somebody doing exceptional work in five focused hours than stretching the same task across eight so their day looks sufficiently full. We care about people meeting their commitments, communicating properly, being there when the team needs them and taking ownership of what they are responsible for.

Where they happen to be sitting while they do that is considerably less interesting to us.

For MOK’HOUSE, working smarter is not about finding ways to do less. It is about removing the parts of work that exist largely to prove that work is happening, and putting that energy back into the things that actually matter.

Flexibility works best when it comes with trust

Flexibility has become another workplace word that can sound generous while meaning very little.

To us, flexibility is less interesting as a perk than it is as an expression of trust.

People have lives outside their jobs. They have families, appointments, responsibilities, interests, good mornings and occasionally terrible ones. Pretending those things stop existing during working hours does not make somebody more professional.

We would rather build a company where there is enough trust for people to manage their work without every deviation from a traditional schedule becoming a conversation.

That also requires something in return.

Autonomy only works when there is accountability. People need to communicate clearly, meet commitments and understand that flexibility should make the work better rather than make somebody else’s job harder.

The two ideas are not in opposition.

In fact, we think some of the healthiest working relationships sit somewhere between them: a high degree of freedom paired with a very clear understanding of responsibility.

There is plenty of evidence that the quality of the employee experience matters beyond simply making work nicer. Gallup’s ongoing State of the Global Workplace research continues to connect employee engagement with meaningful business outcomes including productivity and performance.

People doing good work and people having a good experience of work do not need to be competing objectives.

Burnout is not a badge of honour

Creative industries have historically had a complicated relationship with exhaustion.

There can be an almost romantic quality attached to the all-nighter, the impossible deadline and the project that required everybody to give absolutely everything to get it over the line.

Sometimes work genuinely does demand more from you. Productions run late. Launches have immovable dates. Problems appear at inconvenient times and occasionally everyone needs to push.

But an exceptional week and a permanently unsustainable workplace are two very different things.

The World Health Organization defines burnout in the occupational context as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Its inclusion in the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases is a useful reminder that constant exhaustion should not be mistaken for an ambitious company culture. The WHO’s guidance on workplace burnout is fairly unambiguous about that distinction.

We want MOK’HOUSE to be ambitious.

We want to work on important projects, solve difficult problems and make things at a very high standard.

We just do not think being permanently depleted is evidence that those ambitions are serious.

The goal should be building a way of working that can sustain good people long enough for them to do their best work repeatedly, rather than extracting everything from them until they no longer want to.

Different people do good work differently

There is also something inherently strange about trying to make every person work in exactly the same way.

Some people think aloud. Others need time before they speak.

Some people are extraordinarily organised on paper. Others can hold an entire project in their head and see relationships nobody else noticed.

Some thrive in a room full of people. Others produce their best thinking after they have been left alone with the problem for a while.

A good workplace should have enough structure for people to work together without requiring them to become the same person in order to belong there.

That becomes particularly important in a creative company.

MOK’HOUSE is deliberately built around different disciplines and different kinds of thinkers. Our capabilities span strategy, design, production, content, sound and marketing, and naturally the people working across those areas will not all approach a problem in exactly the same way.

We see that as useful.

The point of bringing specialists together is not to flatten those differences until everybody works identically. It is to create enough clarity and mutual respect that different ways of thinking can contribute to the same outcome.

We want people to be able to disagree

A good creative culture cannot be built entirely around agreement.

If everybody in the room is afraid to challenge the first idea, the most senior person will often end up having the best idea by default.

That is not particularly interesting.

We would rather work in an environment where people can question something without the conversation becoming personal. Where somebody can say they think an idea is wrong, explain why and make the work better because of it.

That requires confidence from both sides.

It requires people to know the difference between defending their expertise and defending their ego. It also requires leadership that does not ask for opinions and then punish people for having them.

Collaboration is often presented as everybody getting along.

We think it is closer to everybody caring enough about the outcome to have the difficult conversation when the work needs it.

High standards and healthy culture can exist at the same time

There is sometimes an odd assumption that the alternative to a traditional high-pressure workplace is one where expectations disappear.

We do not believe that either.

Good culture should not mean nobody is ever uncomfortable, nothing is urgent and every piece of feedback is softened until it no longer says anything.

People deserve clarity.

If something is not good enough, it should be possible to say so. If a deadline matters, everybody should understand why it matters. If someone owns a responsibility, the rest of the team should be able to trust that it will be handled.

Kindness and standards are not opposites.

Neither are flexibility and discipline.

In many ways, the better the culture becomes, the clearer those expectations can be because people do not have to spend half their energy trying to interpret the politics around them.

The work can simply become the focus.

Culture eventually becomes visible outside the company

There is another reason we care about all of this.

Internal culture never remains entirely internal.

Clients eventually experience it.

They feel whether the people working on their project communicate with one another. They notice whether somebody takes ownership when something goes wrong. They can tell when a team understands the bigger picture and when five people are simply completing five disconnected tasks.

The same thing happens in the work.

When people feel trusted enough to contribute properly, they tend to bring more of their thinking to the table. When different specialists are genuinely allowed into the conversation, their expertise has a better chance of influencing the outcome. When people are exhausted or afraid of getting something wrong, the safest idea usually becomes much more attractive.

The systems behind the scenes may be invisible, but their consequences rarely are.

That is part of the thinking behind the way MOK’HOUSE is being built: as a creative house that brings together specialist talent, perspective and craft around the work rather than forcing every project through the same fixed structure.

We are still building it

This is not a declaration that we have solved workplace culture.

We haven’t.

MOK’HOUSE is still growing, and one of the privileges of that stage is that we are still able to question what we want to take with us.

There will be systems that work until they don’t. Ideas we feel strongly about now may evolve when the company becomes bigger. Different people will need different things from us, and inevitably there will be moments where the culture we intended to create and the experience somebody actually has are not perfectly aligned.

The important part is staying interested enough to notice.

Because companies do not wake up one morning with a culture. They build one slowly through hundreds of ordinary decisions about who gets trusted, what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated and how people are treated when the pressure is on.

We know the kind of work we want MOK’HOUSE to be known for.

We are equally interested in building the kind of place where people can actually make it.

The kind of company we would want to work for ourselves.