Professional Conduct and Communication
Purpose
Establishes expectations around professional conduct and communication.
Scope
Gives both a brief high-level coverage of professionalism, and some specific examples.
Professional Conduct
How to communicate with clients, and general practices.
TLDR: Act professionally with clients.
You’re given flexibility (schedule, location, school) at Countable because we trust you to minimize the impact of those things on clients.
Maintaining Professionalism with Clients
As a team, Countable leans towards being casual with one another. In general, we believe this is a strength.
However, we must keep in mind that we are also a consultancy, which means we offer high value knowledge based services analogous to those of a doctor or lawyer.
In the same way a doctor’s work is of life and death consequence, our own work is critical for the privacy and security of our users, and critical for the business success of our clients.
It’s true we have a culture that is relaxed in terms of language andclothing among our team, have time off with flexible hours, and do our best to accomodate each person’s lifestyle.
However, we are very serious about doing high quality work for our users and clients, and maintaining their confidence by acting professionally. In practice this means:
- We allow people to work from anywhere in the world, and have flexible schedules. However, we do our best to prevent our clients needing to worry about this.
- It’s not a secret if you’re taking classes, travelling overseas, etc. But we don’t advertise these things to the client.
- If the client asks, you can discuss it, but don’t volunteer this information because the conversation should be about our client (not you, and not Countable).
- If you can’t make a specific meeting time, do not offer the reason.
- The client does not need to know it’s because you have another business meeting, classes, or it’s the middle of the night where you are.
- When meeting clients over video, work from a well-lit room, and wear clean, reasonable clothing that you’d wear to a job interview.
- Never be late (even a few minutes) for meetings, especially when clients are involved.
- If you are, apologize because the reality is you’ve just wasted people’s time.
- Always reply to clients’ emails or Trello comments within 24 hours with a resolution.
- This means, it should be clear what the next step is, by whom.
- If the item doesn’t require action, say so - “We can revisit this in the future.”
See Also