One of Jellyvision’s strongest assets is its culture. Unlike many companies, where culture is little more than a synonym for free food and foosball, at Jellyvision our culture is the manifestation of our fundamental belief in honesty and kindness.

In addition, where other companies’ cultures can become a smothering blanket of enforced homogeneity, at Jellyvision, folks who join us are encouraged to shape and improve the culture that they find. If they find something that troubles them, they know that speaking up will be met with open ears and a desire to make things better.

Into this culture of honesty, kindness and flexibility, our CEO, Amanda Lannert sent an email out to the whole company in response to what’s been happening at Uber.

Emails like this show that the values that we built our culture on are lived and breathed all the way to the top at Jellyvision.

I’m sharing this email because this is what I expect from my leadership and I think that this is what everybody should expect and demand from their leadership. Culture flows down from the leaders in a company and every deserves better than the toxic mess that is Uber’s leadership.

I hope that you’re lucky enough to have someone of Amanda’s caliber guiding your company’s values and principles.

Hi Jellyvision.

Happy Friday. It’s been another crazy news week with Susan Fowler’s Uber blog post making the rounds. It seems Uber is vying to take Zenefits’ crown for the Most Upsetting Culture award.

There have been a number of conversations about it. This email is my effort to participate in those conversations – but with everybody.

In a company with very few policies, we in fact have a sexual harassment policy. It lives here1. But the policy isn’t as important as our practices (as no policy is as important as practice), and I’d like to reiterate a few things for the record:

  • No one at Jellyvision should EVER be subjected to behavior that make them feel harassed, intimidated, in danger, or unfairly treated by dint of their gender, ethnicity, orientation, religion, race, identification, or status. Period. Full stop.

  • Yes, we try to maintain an unusually freewheeling work environment, which includes humor that might be frowned upon in other offices. But never at the expense of making our space a hostile work environment.

  • If you are ever feeling harassed or unfairly treated, or notice such behavior whether on your team or outside it, please approach the person immediately according to our custom of open and honest feedback – unless you feel threatened or discriminated against by that individual.

    In such instances, you do not need to deal directly with the person – but should bring the situation to Mary Beth2, Kurt3 and/or me to address immediately.

    Your professional life will NOT, I repeat, NOT be compromised by pointing out inappropriate behavior - even if it’s your manager’s.

We have got to treat each other respect and hold each other accountable if that standard ever starts to slip. You have my full support, as well as the support of every single senior leader, in this regard.

Thanks for reading.

Amanda

1: This sentence linked to an internal document outlining our sexual harassment policy
2: Our VP of People
3: Our CFO and General Counsel