Dear Candidate,

Thank you for choosing to be part of Homebase. At Homebase, we believe in alignment of expectations so that there is no ambiguity. We believe that when people are aligned, they can achieve better results together and be more fulfilled at work. Alignment also contributes to a more harmonious and productive work environment. 

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This letter is our attempt to explicate our expectations for everyone in the team. We wanted you to read this letter before you sign the offer letter because we believe it is only fair for you to know ahead of time what you’re signing up for – we don’t want to surprise you with our expectations after you join the company.

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We understand that some of the expectations might not be conventional. There’s a simple reason why: if we do things the conventional way, we’ll end up with conventional results. On average, most startups fail. It really takes extraordinary effort from everyone on the team to will our company to success, so we can’t just stop at conventional ways.

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In reading this letter, if you really don’t see yourself working in such an environment, please do not force yourself to accept the job offer. Homebase is deliberately built not to be suitable for everyone – there is a specific cut of people we’re self-selecting for. 

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Optimize for team success

We expect you to put the team first. It’s really hard for the team to win if everyone of us is optimizing for our own individual glory. It’s like playing football and everyone in the team is trying to be the top scorer. There’s really no glory to be found when your team is losing – you can’t be a winner if your team is losing. There should only be one scoreboard – the team’s – which means we all have to make personal sacrifices from time to time in order for the team to win.

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Similarly, departments are expected to help one another and not be too calculative. To return to football analogy, if the opponent is super strong on offense, your strikers and midfielders cannot just say it’s the defenders’ and goalkeeper’s job to defend. If you’re serious about winning, everyone will have to adjust and chip in on defense.

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Also, in great teams, people don’t wait to be told what to do. They see things that are not right, they’ll take the initiative to fix it. Everything is everyone’s problem, so if you see something that isn’t right, whether it is your department or not, bring it up and let’s try to solve it together. 

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Be open

As a company, we try to be as open as possible and radically transparent – within reason of course. We do this because we believe that when people are equipped with more information, they can make better decisions, and as a team, we’re more likely to arrive at the right answers. Additionally, it helps to build trust within the organization.

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Likewise, we expect you to be open and have the courage to share your thoughts and concerns in a constructive manner. We believe that when people share their views openly, not only does the quality of decision-making improve, workplace harmony also improves as there’s lesser basis for politicking. 

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Conflict in search of better answers is productive

Many organizations operate in artificial harmony. People don’t like many things, but they wouldn’t say it because they dread conflicts. That’s not good because problems don’t get resolved and information is withheld which lessens the odds of success for the team. 

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A healthy organization is one where people openly air their views and are receptive to differences in opinions. Everyone assumes good intentions on the part of others – that they are all just trying to help the team win. Collectively, they debate and reason in search of better solutions, which doesn’t have to be their own. The best ideas win regardless of seniority. When a decision is reached, even if people disagree, they agree to commit to it anyway because they have faith in the decision-making process and the power of collective wisdom.

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We expect everyone at Homebase to see conflicts and hard conversations as healthy mechanisms to surface better answers and not shun away from them. We also expect you to encourage your colleagues to see it as their moral obligation to do the same so that our team has a higher chance of success.

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Aim to stay for at least 18 months & let us know way ahead of time if you plan to leave

While we hope to have everyone work with us for as long as possible, we understand that people rarely stay in one job for their entire life. It is perfectly understandable and reasonable that you might at some point down the line choose to move on to another company. 

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We only have 2 requests in this regard: 1) try to stay at least 18 months; and 2) as soon as you have intention to leave, even before you have found a new job, let us know ahead of time. 

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We hope you can commit to Homebase for at least 18 months because it’s really better for both parties: it’s less disruptive for your team, and you get to learn a lot more as you wouldn’t just be touching the surface of things, which is what happens when you jump from places to places – plus your CV wouldn’t come across as a job hopper’s.

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It is not uncommon for people to find a new job first and then tender their resignation. We’re not saying this is wrong, but there’s an alternative approach that we believe is much better for both parties: let your team know way ahead of time that you intend to leave, then go on to hunt for a new job with the support of your team, and when you have found the new job you can move on more seamlessly.  

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This is better for both parties: for the team, they have more time to prepare for the transition and wouldn’t be caught by surprise. For you, because you have given notice months ahead of time, you might not even need to serve the full 30-day advance notice when you eventually find a new job, which gives you an advantage in competitive job openings. Also, on our part, we commit to be supportive in your next career move, so you wouldn’t even have to do the job search surreptitiously, which allows you to widen your search options. We can even offer a glowing testimonial to your potential new company if you have performed well at Homebase. This is especially helpful because good companies always do reference checks with their potential hires’ latest employers. If you cannot furnish them with one, it sends a very bad signal that something might be off.

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Conversely, should you change your mind after notifying us of your intention to leave, that’s OK as well. We understand that life happens and change of plans are common. We believe this level of openness and transparency with regards to career plans helps to foster trust.

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Meritocracy

Meritocracy is the belief that people should be promoted solely on the basis of their abilities and merits, and not because of their social-economic background (e.g. just because they come from a rich or powerful family etc.) 

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At Homebase, we are adamant about running the company based on meritocracy. If you’re willing to work hard and prove your abilities, we’ll advance you within reason. Needless to say, we expect you to demonstrate these over a sustained period of time as well since many people are good for just several months before fizzling out. 

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On your end, we expect you to support and help advance the virtue of meritocracy in all that we do at Homebase. We find it absolutely abominable that, in many state-owned enterprises in Vietnam, you can be promoted or get to a high position simply because your family is powerful (or that you paid for it). These make for such a horrible work environment where incompetent people occupy positions of power that they neither deserve nor are fit for. This in turn drives away capable people who don’t want to work for incompetent bosses or in unfair company systems. Inevitably, the company starts to spiral downwards. 

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Similarly, we do not promote simply by virtue of people having been around for a long time or because they are doing very well in their current role; instead, we promote people only when we believe they have the skills and ability to succeed in the next role. We do this so as not to set people up for failure. This is our countermeasure against what is known as the Peter Principle: companies tend to promote people based on success in their current role, but at some point, people will reach a level where they are not performing well enough to deserve a promotion (a “level of respective incompetence”), hence they will stagnate in that role. Over time, every role in an organization is filled with people who are incompetent.

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Also, we only do promotion and pay increments once a year (except for sales, which have their own scheme). We do not give people a raise or promotion simply because they ask for one or are vocal about it. We do this out of respect and fairness to everyone else in the organization. When an employee threatens to leave unless they are given a pay raise of a few million VND, the easy way out for many managers is to simply relent and give them the pay increment and tell the employee not to tell anyone else. That is not principled. Inevitably, words will spread, and now every other employee feels that they owe it to their family to ask for a pay raise, and they are short-changing their family by not asking. Unintentionally, the manager has opened up a Pandora’s box. We want to be explicit that we do not give ourselves the luxury to do off-cycle promotions or increments, so please do not ask us for one as our hands are tied. 

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Have a growth mindset

We expect people at Homebase to constantly grow and develop themselves, such as by reading books, taking online courses during their free time etc. As Jack Ma is fond of saying, everyone works hard during working hours, but what separates the great from the merely good is what they do after working hours. Someone who doesn’t invest the time to get better is putting a cap on his / her ceiling whereas a person that is constantly growing has no limit to what he / she is capable of achieving or becoming in due time. 

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If you are not constantly improving yourself by at least reading a few books a year, listening to quality audio materials or taking courses outside of work, it is unlikely that you will be able to keep up with the growth of the company. As an early-stage startup, the pace at Homebase is hectic, and the nature of the challenge keeps changing, so if you’re not constantly retooling and improving yourself, you will be obsolete very quickly. We also highly encourage you to share what you have learnt and encourage others to keep improving themselves as well.

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Also, you’ll notice that at Homebase, you get a lot of liberty to set your own OKRs, daily tasks that you want to accomplish etc. When setting these targets, be ambitious; challenge yourself – there’s no joy in playing small and aiming low. Really, in this life, it’s you against you that is the most epic battle of all.

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Raise the bar

Keeping the talent level really, really high is very important for our success. Here’s a simple way to think about it: many of the best students in Vietnam go to places like Harvard or Stanford to study; many startups in the US are founded by students from those schools. But not just that: their first 20 hires are probably all from those places. We don’t stand a fighting chance against them if we don’t at least hire some of the best people in Vietnam. 

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At Homebase, one of the things we’ve done well early on is to bring in really good people, but these too can easily be eroded if we don’t make a conscious, determined effort to keep the talent level pure. Many startups in fact started out like us: they started with really high standards, but overtime, their standards drop because they succumb to the pressure to hire faster and also because the subsequent people that make the hiring decisions are not as selective; therefore, we really need everyone in the team to help keep the standard high. For every potential hire / newcomer, always make sure that he / she will actually lift the average of the company higher.

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Beyond just hiring good people, we also need to make sure that everyone at Homebase is performing at a high standard. This can mean delivering high quality work, behaving professionally, being punctual, taking ownership etc. We need to hold people accountable to these high standards because accountability is one of those things that can easily slip into a downward spiral. When one person in the team doesn’t deliver on his / her deliverables and gets away scot-free, it sends a strong signal to the rest of the team that missing deadlines and underperformance are acceptable. If we as a team are serious about winning, we should not tolerate transgressions like these. 

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As such, we expect everyone in the team to hold each other accountable. When you hold someone accountable, you’re respecting his / her abilities and signaling your belief that he / she is better than that. 

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Anti-corruption, integrity and ethics 

We expect you to behave in an ethical and upstanding manner. Corruption is the primary reason why many developing economies continue to be in malaise. Corruption is when someone who is already paid to do a job by an organization, secretly extracts self-serving benefits / bribes from the customers, third-parties, or even internal stakeholders. 

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When this happens, the corrupt individual is the only one that benefits - everyone else suffers: the customer ends up paying an arbitrarily marked-up price along with a dreadful experience, and the good standing of the organization and everyone associated with it suffers unwittingly. The corrupt individual is momentarily enriched; friction is added to transactions; inefficiency and ineffectiveness breed, which leads to loss of competitiveness of the organization as a whole; the organization can then no longer pay competitive wages; the corrupt individual’s wage gets hurt; and now he / she needs to resort to even more corrupt acts to supplement his / her income. The vicious and dreadful cycle repeats, and this is the story of many underperforming organizations – and countries.

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It really doesn’t have to be this way. If everyone puts the good of the whole above themselves, the entire cycle will spin in reverse order, and everyone is lifted higher and progresses upwards together. 

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In countries like Singapore, you’ll literally be put in jail for corruption and bribery. So, what counts as corruption / bribery? Without a doubt, if you ask for “coffee money”, kickbacks etc., you’re taking bribes and deserve to be punished; however, even lavish gifts or dinners could arguably count as bribes. As a rule of thumb, when in doubt, always disclose everything.

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At Homebase, we have a zero tolerance policy for corruption and bribery. If you’re caught taking bribes, we will dismiss you immediately and use your case as a warning for the rest. We will also ensure that you compensate for the losses and may pursue legal actions against you. We sincerely hope you understand that we do this for the betterment of the team and society, which you’re a part of. We fundamentally believe that everyone wants to work in an upstanding environment, so if you see anyone in the team behaving contrary to this, please report the transgression to the management team. 

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Adhere to SOPs & protocols

Working at Homebase is exciting because we’re dealing with large sums of money, but this also means that we’re expected to own up to a higher level of responsibility. Each mistake could be costly – easily in the millions and billions of VND. This is why the company has spent considerable time to create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and protocols for dealing with various situations to make sure that we cover all grounds and are protected against costly mistakes.

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Everyone in the company is expected to adhere to these SOPs and protocols. We have had cases of non-conformance in the past that have led to multi-billion VND losses that hurt everyone in the team. It really isn’t fair for the team to pay for your mistakes.

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To be fair to everyone, if you do not adhere to SOPs and protocols and, as a result, the team suffers a loss, we will hold you accountable and liable for the losses. If you find that the SOPs and protocols don’t make sense or are outdated, it is your responsibility to raise this up, so the team can make amendments and continue to strengthen our processes and workflows over time.

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Additional expectation for salesperson

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Attainment of quota

The good thing about sales is that we’re all aligned. The team wants salespeople to make as much money as possible because it means they have generated a lot of revenue for the team that month. A salesperson that makes more money is generally more satisfied than one who doesn’t. 

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At Homebase, we want our salespeople to make more money so that they are satisfied at work. As such, the sales leaders have come up with some quotas that they believe if attained can make the salespeople financially well-off and consequently more satisfied with their job. If you do not attain the targets, your sales leaders and managers might deem this as reflective of a misfit between you and the role, and choose not to continue having you on their team.

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The following are the quotas:

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• At least [1] transaction for the first month 
• At least [2] transactions for the second month
• At least [3] transactions per month starting from the third month

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We hope you’re not intimidated by the above – we’re just being honest. We would rather be upfront then to surprise you with our expectations after you join. Truth be told, most of these are fairly standard and to be expected at any professional work environment.

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If you have the mental toughness and are up for the challenge, we want you on our team!

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I acknowledge that I have read and understand Homebase’s expectations.

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Name: 

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Signature: 

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Date:

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