Core values drive growth for Canva
Canva believes strong cultures are driven by a deeply shared mission and the staff genuinely living its values.
Canva is a tech company in a hurry to grow. The time is right for the company, which has grown phenomenally from its first days in 2012. Its valuation has skyrocketed in the past decade. In August this year, it was reportedly valued at $39bn.
The online design and communication platform, which has a stated mission to “empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere”, has more than 130 million monthly active users and is used in 190 countries in 100-plus languages.
An Australian success story, Canva is taking the world by storm with its intuitive and easy-to-use approach to design. In a world where content matters and publishing is already democratised, it is making the creation of beautiful content accessible to all.
A “secret” ingredient of its success is still its simplicity of use – one of the six core values behind the company: be a force for good; be a good human; empower others; make complex things simple; pursue excellence; set crazy big goals.
“At Canva, we believe strong cultures are driven by a deeply shared mission and genuinely living our values,” says Jennie Rogerson, Canva’s global head of people. “We recognise that every single person makes our culture.”
Empowering people and allowing them to develop their skills is deeply ingrained in Canva.
Emily Stewart, who joined Canva in 2019 as an email marketer and team lead, is now group product lead. Her team, which grew from three to 20 people very quickly, now has more than 150 people across engineering, design and product, overseeing features of the design platform that delivers key experiences to users.
She credits her professional development to the empowering philosophy of the company which helped her move into a new role in product development.
“I loved my time in marketing and it gave me my start in tech as well as skills that I’ve carried into my current role,” Stewart says. “However, since having the opportunity to move from marketing into product management, I’ve grown in ways I never knew I was capable of.
“When I first started at Canva I had a lot of people saying that I’d make a good product manager, but I didn’t think much of it in those early days and was more interested in developing my skills as a marketer and seeing what I could contribute to that space.
“As my role evolved from traditional marketing to spending a lot more time with our engineering team to push our product goals forward, I recognised that the technical side of things was what I enjoyed most and wanted to further my skills in,” she says.
“I was fortunate to have amazing leaders and teammates around me who supported the transition and helped me develop the skills to now lead company-wide projects that are solving big and complex challenges for our community.”
Rogerson says it has taken a lot of hard work to develop the company culture of flexibility, connection and inclusion, “a culture that is both unique and continuously evolving, especially as we scale our team across new offices around the world”.
“Our culture is one that is rooted in collaborating to solve big and complex challenges to achieve huge goals, while also simultaneously always living our values,” she says.
Our culture isn’t bound by locations. It is rooted in our values, our team and our mission to empower the world to design through our goals that are shared
Canva has a work model with three categories of staff, based on what works for them: hybrid, permanent remote and onsite.
Hybrid staff have the flexibility to work from a Canva office, with no company-set days to be in the office, except during team events. Permanent remote staff spend most of their time remotely, and connect with their teams virtually, occasionally travelling to the office. Onsite staff – for example, hospitality and ground control teams – spend the majority of their time in the office.
“Our culture isn’t bound by locations,” says Rogerson. “It is rooted in our values, our team and our mission to empower the world to design through our goals that are shared, regardless of where and how you work.”
The last few years have been exciting for the company, especially with launch of Visual Suite and Magic Studio – “the world’s first all-in-one design platform”. There is an all-round buzz within the business, with the staff numbers growing from 1000 to 4000 in the past three years. About 1000 staff members were added this year alone.
“We are continuing to grow our team,” says a Canva spokesperson. “We currently have 240 open roles and 300,000 applications a year, and we have opened three new offices in Melbourne, Austin and London this year.”
The consistent theme that motivates Cochlear’s people is the sense of purpose in improving people’s lives
Medical device company Cochlear has also grown over the years.
“Cochlear has had a remarkable growth story,” says Jen Hornery, Cochlear’s senior vice-president people and culture.
“Since the company started over 40 years ago, following Australian Professor (Graeme) Clark’s invention of the multichannel cochlear implant, we’ve grown from a handful of people to over 5000 people worldwide, all working towards our mission to help more people hear.
“We have adapted our engagement strategy over time,” she says. “The consistent theme that motivates Cochlear’s people is the sense of purpose in improving people’s lives by helping them to either hear for the first time or regain their hearing.
“Our distinctiveness stems from the fact that our team believes in our mission,” Hornery says. “Ninety-one per cent of our employees say they are proud to tell people they work at Cochlear and 94 per cent say they understand how they contribute to customer satisfaction.
“Each year our leadership team takes our culture and engagement very seriously. Thriving people are core to our strategy and enable us to grow for the future. There is no secret formula. Each year we measure the factors that contribute to engagement and try to address feedback where there are tensions and work on areas to improve.”
