Building bonds, creating glowing memories, like friendship, is a fundamental human need. It changes how we feel and gives us common ground. We want to inspire people all over the world by visualising and materialising bonding moments and memories as a reminder that we still require sharing physical moments together, to set digital devices aside and spend bonding moments with our loved ones. If we succeed, there is more laughter, more empathy, and more joy.

Like all great companies, we strive to create a culture around our core values, Gratitude, Learning, Optimism and Wholeheartedness, along with other fundamental values such as integrity, excellence, respect, inclusion, and collaboration. While it sounds so simple, it is extremely rare in these fast-paced times.

To get there, we need amazing people like you, with every new member of our team, our unusual culture gets new unique perspectives and gain new experiences. Before you proceed further, spend a moment and go through our story, our mission, vision and core values via the button below and head right back here to continue our culture and code of conduct.

There are companies where people ignore thrash on the floor, leaving batteries uncharged and laying around, moving stuff out of their desk space onto common space or intruding into other’s space just because they want more space themselves, leaving company phone unanswered because the team member responsible for answering phone calls went to the toilet.

And there are companies where people in the office lean down to pick up the trash they see, bothered to charge batteries when they see them laying around, sort stuff and tidy up their space so the office looks more organised, picking up the phone call when the team member responsible is busy or gone to the toilet, giving their fellow colleagues a better environment to work in as they would do at home. We try hard to be the latter, a company where everyone feels a sense of responsibility to do the right thing to help the company at every juncture.

The above is the metaphor for taking care of problems, small and large, and never thinking “that’s not my job.” We do not have rules or roles on the above, we want to create a sense of ownership, responsibility and accountability so that this behaviour comes naturally.

Respect the processes but embrace the empowerment of freedom. Some processes are about increased productivity, carefully made processes and systems enable everyone to be on the same page, which improves collaboration among team members and better experience for customers, for example;

• When a customer calls in for an enquiry, the process is to immediately note down the name, email, contact number and enquiry details, after which this set of information is passed to the relevant parties.
• This ensures the customer won’t be asked the same information twice, and the relevant party do not have to keep asking for specific information.

We are in the creative business, not a system and engineering firm where heavy machinery and equipment is involved, the worst thing that can happen is having too many rules and regulations that limit creativity. We want to inspire more than manage, we trust our teams to do what they think is best for Firefly Photography by giving them lots of freedom of decisions and information to support them. This in turn encourages developing the natural behaviour and mentality of responsibility, accountability and self-discipline that drives us to do great work that benefits not only the company but ourselves.

We believe that people thrive on being trusted, on freedom, and on being able to make a difference. So we foster freedom and empowerment wherever we can. You might think that such freedom would lead to chaos. But we also don’t have a clothing policy, yet no one has come to work naked. The lesson is you don’t need policies for everything. Most people understand the benefits of wearing clothes at work.

There are a few important exceptions to our anti-rules pro-freedom philosophy. We are strict about ethical issues and safety issues. Harassment of employees or trading on insider information is zero tolerance issues, for example. Some information security issues, such as keeping our customer data and information safe, have strict controls around access.

On rare occasions, freedom is abused and we have a low tolerance for that. We had an employee once who sought another colleague’s help to be a mobile light stand, who is a petite lady, this lady was tasked to raise a 5kg strobe light for the duration of the photoshoot just because this employee had forgotten to bring a light stand and didn’t want to take a taxi back to the studio to retrieve it. But those are the exceptions, and we avoid over-correcting. Just because a few people abuse freedom doesn’t mean that our employees are not worthy of great trust.

Firefly strongly believed in the empowerment of all employees. For every significant decision, there is a responsible captain of the ship who makes a judgement call after sharing and digesting others’ views. This “captain” could be anyone who stepped up in situations where a common consensus cannot be made. This is how we farm for leadership, someone who stepped up, make a judgement call and understands he or she will be accountable and responsible for the decision made, this is not easy and is often tempting to avoid stepping up when a situation doesn’t go according to plan.

Many times, teams will meet about topics, projects and debate them, even in actual production situations, but then afterwards, someone needs to make a decision and be that “captain”. Small decisions may be shared just by email, larger ones will merit a memo with the discussion of the various positions, and why the captain made such a decision.

Sometimes, we cannot wait for a common consensus nor do we rush for a decision to be made quickly without thinking through. When the captain of any particular decision is reasonably confident of the right bet for us to take, they decide and we take that bet, we empower that “captain” to make a good judgement call. Afterwards, as the impact of the decision becomes clearer, we reflect on the decision and see if we could do even better in the future.

Disagreement happens all the time, regardless of seniority, we are all humans and we make mistakes by agreeing and disagreeing on a decision or material issue, however, silent disagreement is unacceptable and unproductive. If you disagree on a material issue, be it you are a senior or junior, it is your responsibility to explain why you disagree, ideally in both discussion and in writing. While not all suggestions and proposals will be agreed to, the tenacity of accepting rejection or no for an answer makes you a stronger person.

A back and forth discussion can clarify different views and concise writing of the core issues helps people reflect on what is the best judgement call or call-to-action, it also promotes empathy and knowledge sharing. The “captain” on that decision of the discussion has the responsibility to welcome, understand, and consider your opinions, but may not agree. Once the captain makes a decision, we expect everyone to help make it as successful as possible. Later, if new information on that decision becomes available, it is encouraged to revisit the topic and discuss it openly.

If a village has too many chieftains, the village falls, if a country has too many presidents, the government collapses and the country falls into anarchy. Though we fiercely farm for leadership, among leaders, there must always be one “captain” who will make the carefully informed, and calculated decision especially if the decision has a significant impact on the company.

As companies grow, they often become highly centralised and inflexible, symptoms include:

• Pleasing other internal groups or seniors, taking precedence over pleasing customers.
• Organisation structure becomes too coordinated, rigid, slow, frustrating and limiting creativity.
• Too many cross-departmental meetings without a call to action or reaching a common consensus.
• Too many people are involved in making small decisions.

We avoid this by our empowerment tenet, encouraging freedom, responsibility, accountability and disagreeing openly. We spend lots of time debating strategy together, and then trust each other to execute on tactics without prior approvals. Often, two groups working on the same goals won’t know of or have approval over, their peer activities. If later, the activities don’t seem right, we have a candid discussion. We may find that the strategy was too vague or the tactics were not aligned with the agreed strategy. And we discuss generally how we can do better in the future.

All senior management including the director, junior employees are required to follow the Firefly Code Of Conduct, in it are the tenets of the company that everyone needs to adhere to, these tenets are far from rules, but a guideline that kept us going in the right direction, maintaining discipline, safety and ensuring a great environment to work in.

The journey to create a successful dream team is dependent upon the collaborative efforts of high-performance individuals and effective context. Ultimately, the end goal is to grow the business for a bigger impact while increasing flexibility and agility. We seek to be big, fast and nimble.

We do not seek to preserve our culture — we seek to improve it. Every person who joins us helps to shape and evolve the culture further. We find new ways to accomplish more together. Every few years we can feel a real difference in how much more effectively we are operating than in the past. We are learning faster than ever because we have more dedicated people with diverse perspectives trying to find better ways for our talented team to work together more cohesively, nimbly and effectively.

As we wrote in the beginning, what is unique about Firefly Photography is how much we:

• Encourage independent decision-making by employees
• Share information openly, broadly, and deliberately
• Disagree openly and are extraordinarily candid with each other
• Keep only our highly effective people
• Respect the systems and processes while embracing the empowerment of freedom
• Adhere to our tenets and code of conduct

Alone we go fast, together we go far.