What people first means at Paper
Paper will always put people first. People first means we prioritise the human impact of everything we do above anything else. We prioritise the people who work at or with Paper, the people who hire our services, and the people who use those people's services, above making a profit. People first means all people equitably. When we get this wrong, we learn how to be better at putting people first.
Our principles
How we put people first
1. We’re careful
about the work we do
We’re mindful of what we put out into the world and will say no when we feel that’s the right thing to do. When we design things for other people we seek evidence to understand what they need and we ask that others do the same. We only take on work that meets the criteria we decided on as a team:
- We have, or are empowered to get, evidence the work is the right thing to do.
- We have the time and skills necessary to do quality work.
- We are confident we can do the job well.
- We will be able to make a difference to the client and their users.
- The work is moral, ethical and aligned with our individual and collective values.
If we can’t prove all of those things then we may try to help the client reshape their project, or we politely turn down the work.
2. We invest in social good
We have special rates for charities and offer our time for free when we can. And we prioritise opportunities to have a positive social impact even when we’re paid less or not at all.
Between projects we each invest our time in causes we feel passionate about, for example helping build tools to remove online misogyny or researching how the subtitling industry could provide a better cinematic experience for Deaf people. We arrange free service design mentoring to small businesses through legup.social and provide free training and mentorship to school pupils who might not see themselves represented in our industry.
3. We invest
in each other
We place a big emphasis on a culture where our health, wellbeing and sense of belonging comes first, where we can each bring our full selves to work and look after ourselves and each other. We take time to cultivate that culture through co-creation workshops we call ‘Paper days’. We have £1,200 set aside for each Paper person each year for learning. We also spend a big chunk of our working hours, every Friday and between client work, broadening our skills and experience. We do lots of this learning together when we follow each other's passions and ideas on the unpaid projects we choose to lead on.
Our principles
How we enable and
sustain people first
4. We're very careful with money
Paper’s co-founders, Cam, Jon and Mark, take measures to ensure we stay financially secure, like growing the team cautiously while setting aside enough cash to pay everyone during quiet spells. This is important so that:
- Paper people don’t need to worry about job security when we’re short on paid work
- we’re comfortable spending time on development or offering our services for free
- we can avoid our decisions being influenced by a need to pay the bills
- we don’t rely on commercial agreements that can bias how we help our clients.
5. We work hard to develop and improve Paper
Every single person who works at Paper spends time helping the business to learn and grow. We share responsibility for making sure we don’t leave anyone behind and for having the processes and policies in place to hold us to account.
We spend non-client days working together on things like our research patterns, environmental policy, and our ‘how we treat people’ guide. We team up with equity and inclusion experts to create organisational policies like our parental leave policy and anti-racism strategy.
6. We empower the people who work at Paper
All Paper people are empowered to uphold people first, partly just by having these principles here in writing.
There’s no hierarchy to our decision making. Every individual gets a say in whether Paper takes on a project, decides whether we want to join a team, and gets to be honest about what we believe is best for our clients, their users, ourselves and each other. Cam, Jon and Mark look for open, honest, critical thinkers whenever they hire someone new – it’s who Paper people are.
Why we put people first
We choose to put people first because:
- as individuals we all care about making the world a nicer place
- as a business we have a chance to do that, so we should
- the work we do is better for it
- our jobs are more fulfilling for it.