About: InMobi builds transformative technologies to positively impact people, businesses, and societies around the world.
Location: Bangalore, Singapore, Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai, Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi, Melbourne, Jakarta, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, London, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Irvine & Kansas City.
Responses by: Richard O’Sullivan, VP & General Manager, InMobi ANZ
InMobi’s company culture
InMobi is one of the true pioneers when it comes to mobile marketing. We were founded against all odds. A company starting out of India to tackle mobile in 2007 was no ordinary thing. Venture capital was hard to come by and investors were sceptical of India-based companies.
Consequently, InMobi had to ‘think big’ from the very beginning! Fifteen years and a global footprint later, this remains one of our core values. InMobians (as we like to call our people) are encouraged to ‘Think Big’, ‘Be Positive’, ‘Be Passionate’ and ‘Take Ownership’.
Learning and growth is at the heart of our culture. We provide the tools and resources to our team to help them maximise their potential by enabling them to be entrepreneurial, giving them complex challenges to solve and providing opportunities to grow. I’m a great case study for this as I wanted to learn more about the rapidly changing privacy legal landscape in Australia, so I am soon to embark upon a course to better inform our clients and partners.
However, we’re certainly not all work and no play. As a group we tend to be creative and fun loving. We believe in creating a culture of appreciation and celebration, with several employee-centric programs to enable this. Our ‘Think Big’ mindset encourages the team to make audacious goals – and when they are achieved, we celebrate them hard!
To me, what speaks volumes about our culture is the fact we have so many ‘boomerang’ InMobians; those that return to us after leaving for their own start-ups, new roles etc. Again, I’m a case as I spent almost five years at InMobi in Dubai, Singapore, and New York before taking three years out and returning in 2020 to lead Australia and New Zealand. InMobi always leaves the door open, and many choose to return to the fold.
Work-life balance at InMobi
It’s always been important to us here at InMobi, to empower our employees with the freedom and trust to shape their working week in a way that suits their individual and team needs. We have an InMobi Cares program that looks holistically at the wellbeing of our InMobians.
The program covers a comprehensive and competitive leave policy, ethos of auto-approved leave, wellness leave to take care of self and loved ones, various string insurance benefits in times of need, salary advance for times of need and mental wellness initiatives in the areas of sponsored therapy, counselling sessions and mindfulness & meditation sessions. We continue to look for opportunities to make a positive difference in the lives of InMobians.
Additionally, when the pandemic hit and we moved to a remote working situation for most of our global employees, we introduced anonymous employee listening programs to really find out what the challenges and concerns of our employees were. It’s led to feedback we might not otherwise have gotten; the non-confrontational, anonymised nature of the tool has enabled senior management to engage and advise on sensitive issues of work-life balance, diversity, and compensation in an empowering manner. It’s proving to be incredibly insightful and leading to some evolving policies and practices along the way.
Working here
When I re-joined the company in April 2019 as a boomerang InMobian, my remit was to transform local strategy and to develop a team capable of delivering it. The working style was intentionally created around being non-hierarchical with a focus on introducing a way of working centred on our cultural values around autonomy, accountability, and freedom.
Each of our team-members are encouraged to operate with freedom and autonomy and create their own way of working, whilst drawing upon the subject matter expertise of the central business (for example, product, marketing, strategy, creative, general management). This allows them to deliver against the expectations of their respective roles and responsibilities in a way that plays to their strengths.
This model proved robust because when the pandemic hit the world, there was already implicit trust across the team and their working style was less impacted. My role within the business is to set the vision and roadmap for the local business, get buy-in and recommendations from the team and our customers and then act as a catalyst to mitigate the problems on the journey and maximise the potential. What’s important to call out though is the team is the driving force and we try wherever possible to match both personal and professional aspirations…aside from helping us achieve business goals, this makes it much more fun!
Key values
Our culture of openness, collaboration and winning together is based on our four core values – ‘Thinking Big, Being Entrepreneurial’, ‘Being Passionate and Fanatically Driven, Being Proud’, ‘Being Positive, Taking Ownership, Being Accountable’ and ‘Freedom with Responsibility and Integrity’. These values create an ecosystem that fosters a working culture where every person is able to identify and follow their true North.