About: F5 powers applications from development through their entire life cycle, across any multi-cloud environment, to help their customers – enterprise businesses, service providers, governments, and consumer brands — deliver differentiated, high-performing, and secure digital experiences.
Location: Global
Working hard & living well: The F5 Spirit
At F5, we believe that our culture isn’t just something we talk about, it’s something that we live. Every day, we see examples of co-workers truly living the F5 spirit—which we call as being F5. The culture is focused on working hard and living well.
Our goal is to reach new heights and push the boundaries of innovation to deliver the best results for our customers—but never at the expense of our employees’ well-being. We support our entire community consistently, especially during these unprecedented times. The past few months have really highlighted F5’s collaborative and supportive culture locally and globally.
Given our flexible working style, we were already well placed to make the shift to working from home arrangements even before the pandemic hit.
To ensure everyone was set up for success, we provided the tools, technology and support to empower our employees to excel in a new environment—especially as some are now primary care takers, home schooling, or have a family member on the frontlines.
For our customers, we put their technology needs first to enable company-wide remote working arrangements, and the financial aspect as a secondary part of our partnership.
F5 also supports the causes and charities our employees are most passionate about, which speaks to our culture around helping those in need. Driven from the top-down, there’s been a global push toward supporting health workers and charities during this time.
As part of our Global Good initiative, the local Australian office unanimously selected to financially support the University of Queensland in their COVID-19 vaccine development efforts—and earlier this year, F5 provided financial assistance to GIVIT to support their initiatives for the Australia bushfires.
As an ongoing initiative, F5 will match any personal donations from F5ers to support the charities of their choice.
Work-life balance at F5
As we work within a fast-paced, constantly evolving tech industry, F5 supports the need for each employee to live a balanced life—and have work fit within their already busy lives. We adopt a ‘human-first’ approach which is a cornerstone of our values and culture.
At F5, enabling and fostering a realistic work-life balance is more than just a box to tick—it’s part of our DNA. It’s important to foster an employee work-life balance because each and every person is a valuable part of the company, and their lives as well as their well-being, beyond the walls of the company matter to F5.
It’s important for us to acknowledge not just what they do, but who they are, and how they live. By putting the human first, we’re supporting their health and overall well-being.
To enable a work-life balance, F5 is accommodating, realistic and stays true to our core values. We offer work-life integration programs like Freedom to Flex, dynamic employee inclusion groups, paid maternity/paternity leave, tuition assistance for professional development, a comprehensive mentoring program, rewards/recognition, and more.
As we adapt to the changing tides of the tech industry, we must remember that we’re all humans, and that our employees’ families, friends, mental health and well-being always take priority.
While COVID-19 may have heightened the importance of enabling a healthy work-life balance, this always been deeply ingrained into our culture.
Care & Collaboration: Working at F5
Being a global company with local offices and remote workers spread across the world, we work on the basis of care and collaboration. With these qualities underlying our everyday working style, F5 lives by the mantra that work is something you do—not somewhere you go.
We empower leaders by providing innovative technology and the expertise needed to accommodate a remote workforce. The key to enabling this working style is to provide every employee with the resources to be flexible and autonomous.
Our guiding principle is that first and foremost, we do the right thing – for each other, our customers, our shareholders, our community, and the world. Through this we foster a strong sense of trust—so no matter where you are in the world, F5 trusts that every employee is doing the right thing with the flexibility and autonomy that comes with the job.
F5 Company Values
‘We are owners,’ ‘we choose speed’ and ‘we help each other thrive’ are three of the five core values that shape our priorities and goals at F5. The other two values in particular are the ones I aim to embody in every way.
‘We obsess over customer needs’ goes back to our overarching goal to offer ongoing and consistent support to our community. Our customers and their needs sit at the top of our priority list, and we’re committed to working hard to collaboratively go the extra mile.
The second value that’s dear to my heart is ‘we create a more diverse and inclusive F5. Within IT especially, it’s all too common for diversity to be an afterthought when building out teams—but this should also be a priority for business leaders. At F5, we’re on a journey to making this a key pillar of our company.
Employee Benefits at F5
We have a wide range of employee benefits tailored and available to each office around the world—which fall under the categories of health and wellness, financial, lifestyle, parental support as well as additionally perks such as employee referral bonuses.
Particularly, our ‘zoom out days,’ offer employees four days in the year to work on a special project of theirs. This allows them some uninterrupted time to think of different angles, solutions or ideas to solve a problem or enhance a current project—which has proved to be instrumental in fostering creatively within the team.
F5’s employee benefit, which is also very much part of our culture is the ‘Freedom to Flex’ program which means that every employee has the option of choosing their own work environment and decide what works for them.
Wherever they feel most comfortable—whether that’s in the office or their home, or in the outdoors, we all have the freedom to make our own choices, and F5 is there to support that.
If you’d like to showcase your unique company culture on Balance the Grind, get in touch with us today!
Every company approaches culture and work-life balance in their own unique way. Company Cultures is a project by Balance the Grind to showcase different workplaces and cultures from around the world.