sevDesk - an accounting software with a heart
sevDesk is a German accounting software company and was founded 2014.
Accounting is usually a horror topic for smaller companies. sevDesk changed this by making accounting simple and straight forward for non-accountants.
sevDesk is growing like hell and I was lucky being booked as Interim Head of Engineering to scale up the tech organization
Culture is brutally important, and I always look for signs whether a company goes the extra miles there. And sevDesk clearly does.
sevDesk is not a small company (around 150 employees) but has a very distinct company culture.
Example Customers: Mail from sevDesk when support took to long
sevDesk is growing rapidly, and sometimes customer support has more requests that they can handle. Can happen. But is is annoying for customers. sevDesk? They are sending out real postcards with a "We are sorry" note.
Excellent way to connect to customers and establish trust.
Example Employees: Easter challenge and a 500 Euro bonus
Because of covid it's harder than normal to party together and establish a sense of community in the company. Xmas partys did not take place. And also a lot of interaction during office hours is missing.
Not cool.
sevDesk did something really cool before the easter holidays. They created an easter rally. In Germany it is a nice habit that the Easter Bunny hides the gifts and eggs (usually for the kids) in the garden.
Christian Holiday? Easter Bunny? Eggs? Hides things? Yea. Sounds strange. But remember - it is Germany. Not all things have to make sense.
Anyhow - sevDesk created an online easter rally. The company had to work together to solve a mathematical equation. Inputs for the equation were things like:
- Age of the youngest employees
- Age of the oldest employees
- Counting easter eggs in virtual meeting rooms
- And for the equation itself you'd need someone with Matlab knowledge (data scientists eg)
Then there was a website where you could enter the result. And if correct you'd get a gift - or so they said.
It's clear that the whole rally could only be done as a team. So 150 employees gathered in a virtual meeting room and tried to solve that equation.
At the end they made it and the gift was a 500 EUR bonus for every employee. Great way to show gratitude during those strange covid times.
