Hi. My name is Adam, and I work for Prezi in Budapest.
When I’m not hacking at Prezi, I spend my Tuesdays at Corvinus University of Budapest, working towards my Masters degree in Management and Leadership.
As part of my studies, I took a course on “organizational culture.” In the course, we were given a practical group assignment: approach an organization, and do some research into its internal culture. To my excitement, our group chose Prezi!
To begin, we spoke to Prezi CEO Peter Arvai, who asked us to consider two things in our research:
- Each Prezi employee should make it clear what kind of commitment it requires from the company and others who work there, and what kind of outcome they can expect.
- It’s up to everyone to decide individually if they want to participate in the research, no one will decide for them.
This initial conversation helped us identify some of the core cultural values and practices at Prezi. For one, everyone working there commits themselves to keep promises. This value enables trust, so in practice they can rely on each other and work together more efficiently.
Also, Prezi employees are encouraged to always work towards a tangible outcome. This shows the company is focused on everyone working together to improve performance, and achieve set goals.
Still, the most exciting for me was the depth of empowerment Prezi encourages by allowing everyone to make their own decisions. Of course this is only a tiny example above, but I see it in my daily working life at Prezi and I believe it resembles the whole.
Prezi publishes their core values on their website.
To complete our research, my university group and I spent some time at Prezi, hanging out with employees and asking them questions. We also ran a questionnaire for employees to complete (But only if they wanted to!).
We then gathered all the data, and quantified our findings so we could interpret them against established working practices and cultural norms. Check out three of our most interesting results below:
1. Compared to the average values of USA or Hungary, there is less power distance at Prezi. In other words, big decisions are not solely made by those higher up in the company.
GLOBE values range from 1 to 7. In this case 7 would be culture with extreme power concentration. The scales also measure culture in two ways, by looking at what is actually happening in the organization (“practice”, “as is”) and by what people think should happen (“values” or “as it should be”).
Also note that the Prezi practices are quite similar to their values. This means they have as much power concentration as they think it’s good to have.
As an employee, i’ve seen this first hand. Last week, my Prezi team had to decide between two projects. Our team leader preferred one, while the rest of the team believed more in the other. So we talked! After the discussion our team lead still preferred his original choice, but we had the freedom to do the one we believed in. Why? Because there is respect and trust, and everyone's opinion is seen as valid. There is little power distance.
2. At Prezi, there was almost no difference in how the managers and other employees saw the company.
We also expected some difference between the San Francisco and Budapest offices, but despite the geographical, national, and cultural distances we found none.
As an employee, I feel this contributes to the overall Prezi vibe - whilst our backgrounds, hobbies, and personal lives are all so different, it feels like we are all aligned here at Prezi... which is cool.
3. Employees of Prezi are more willing than the average employee to share knowledge and resources within the organization, and are proud not only of their small teams but Prezi as a whole. This finding was derived from studying results of the two concepts below:
Institutional collectivism is the degree to which an organization encourages and rewards collective distribution of resources and collective action.
In-Group Collectivism is the degree to which individuals express pride, loyalty, and cohesiveness in their organization.
And here’s what we found:
Institutional Collectivism
In-Group Collectivism
I too see this whilst working for Prezi. For example, people on their first (trial) week at Prezi are usually surprised by the huge support that they get from everyone. We’re growing rapidly but we are still helping and paying a lot of attention to each other.
.
Along with my group (Beáta Bánky, Tímea Fésüs, Judit Karsza), I really enjoyed conducting this research into the Prezi culture. And it’s good to quantify that my own feelings of Prezi are shared by my colleagues. We seem to have created a happy and productive working environment and it’s certainly one which I enjoy being in. With new employees joining weekly here at Prezi, It will be interesting to revisit these findings in the future, and see how we have developed as an organization.
Friday, April 27, 2012 at 6:06AM 
