The first year since Telefónica Digital was born has been a truly exciting one. From starting with a blank sheet of paper, the company is now a genuinely multi-national entity with no one dominant culture.

Walking through the door in any of our offices, we hear a variety of languages being spoken, friendships being made and teams learning from each other. We now employ around 6,500 people from over 24 different nationalities across five main geographical centres. We have people working in 17 different countries across 30 sites.

Our recruitment record speaks for itself. New people have moved into this business from other organisations including Google, Skype, Yahoo, Samsung and Microsoft, and in the last nine months we have recruited around 600 people into new positions.

Whilst there is no ‘type’ within Telefónica Digital, our people are highly motivated and want the challenges and opportunities to shape the future that our business is able to give them.

As our teams are often virtual, working flexibly across different territories, they need to behave like entrepreneurs, making full use of the technology we supply them with to work assemble temporary teams and get a job done.

So, although our culture will undoubtedly continue to develop organically, there are some clear things we have done in the last year which demonstrate our cultural blueprint. For instance…

• We have no formal grade structure and instead of setting annual objectives, we work to a fast-paced, four-monthly review structure to measure success by project and outcomes.
• We are implementing a new cloud-based HR management tool which will enable our people to deliver every aspect of our work in the most cutting-edge way available across our home markets.
• We are also developing a more flexible approach to reward.
• And we are positively encouraging people to network, learn from internal and external contacts and not be slowed down by decision making and process.

We moved to our new London offices in July – the week before the Olympics started. Situated in the heart of London’s creative community in Soho, the offices clearly demonstrate our commitment to doing things differently. And in Silicon Valley, we moved to Mountain View at the end of June. Although there are currently only around 40 people working there, they represent a real life United Nations including employees from the USA, UK, New Zealand, Australia Spain, Mexico, Philippines, Israel, Bolivia, Ireland, Germany, South Africa and Canada.

It’s only one year in and we are still learning – that’s the way it should be in any business, particularly one that is growing and creating as fast as this one.