Strategy

We can only innovate if people know and understand what we are trying to achieve (оur Mission & Vision).

At Secure Group, we realize that today the privacy and security of people's communications are at risk.
We understand that in a world gripped by cybercrime and mass surveillance, intruders can easily steal personal data and compromise correspondence unless people have the right tools.
That is why we decided to revive privacy through strong encryption, education, transparency, and control. Our technology eliminates workarounds to security, giving users the means to communicate with anyone, anywhere – in total privacy.

Everything we do is to challenge the standards of securing people’s mobile communications:
- We engineer solutions for encrypted communications that are bulletproof and easy-to-use.
- We preserve users' information with a product line of secure devices, applications, MDMs and enterprise solutions.
- We believe in the fundamental right to privacy for all. And we don’t just say it, we stand for it by developing solutions that enable people to exchange sensitive information securely, protecting their business, reputation, and personal life.

Our Vision

Leading the fight for a secure mobile world where users will have full control over the privacy of their data and communications.
It’s hard to imagine a world where the privacy of your data will be absolute. Third-party providers have access to incredible amounts of information about end-users without asking for their permission or consent. There’re countless data breaches in every industry on a daily basis. Secure Group wants to change that. We believe in a future where the control over privacy will be placed in the hands of consumers. A mobile world where everyone would be able to secure their information flow and manage who has access to it.

Our Mission

Providing customer-tailored mobile solutions to individuals, businesses, and organizations which help them secure and manage the information flow while preserving the privacy of their data.
Our relationship with consumers and partners is at the heart of our business. Secure Group’s work approach is what makes us unique. We aim at offering not just a working product, but one that will fit the needs of our clients and their business model completely. A solution that both provides full control over the management of data privacy and is intuitive, easy-to-use, and offering all functionalities required by the consumer. 

In order to achieve our vision and mission we realized:
- We needed to reinvent the mobile world through innovation;
- We needed to mitigate any risks that would jeopardize cybersecurity;
- We needed to fight the mobile giants: Google and Apple.

For that, we decided to create our own mobile operating system and a suite of innovative mobile security solutions. But we also knew that to continue our growth and development of even more innovative solutions we needed to be surrounded by unique, remarkable people. On the other hand, to attract these incredible people and get the best out of them, we also realized we needed a new way of working.
Organizations are still run as hierarchical command-and-control systems in a world of networked purpose-driven individuals. The way that humans interact, and information is displayed have dramatically changed and the social dynamics in firms have become messy and full of power relationships that tend to be unfair. This leads to “office politics” which, of course, wastes time. At Secure Group we don’t want this type of environment and we perceived that for this transformation to work well, nothing less than a revolution in management practices was needed.

At Secure Group we have replaced the traditional working model with agile working practices where the individual has genuine autonomy over their working pattern. Our working model shifts away from a command and control mentality toward a leadership style that empowers people, trusting them to get on with the work. That's why employees are treated as innovative and mature, able to make decisions that consider the needs of the employer as well as their own priorities. This model of work has been developed to best-fit the social, technological, and economic influences of the twenty-first century.

People choose why, how and who to work with for reasons unique to them whereas every organization believes in a mission and seeks success that is unique to it. A fit between employers and employees is achieved when these align. This means that we want our people to have work that matters to them so we place them in roles in Secure Group where they can have a meaningful impact and at the same time, we make sure these unique people share our mindset in order for us to achieve our goals.

That is why we created the Secure Group Management Model: to empower and manage high-performing people with the freedom to make a big impact.

Context, not Control

We believe in Context, not Control to provide insight and understanding to make sound decisions. For us, instead of trying to control people, we think that what will lead to High Performance is to set the appropriate context which embraces our strategy, objectives, assumptions, and metrics.

Problems we had when trying to create the right context:
- Micro-managing doesn’t work. It is not scalable, and the many that use it do so because it is comfortable rather than because it is any good
- Innovation drives the most value in a product-led business like ours, so we needed this as the primary focus of our corporate culture
- Inability to convey the company’s business vision and development strategy across the whole company to align teams, departments, and divisions goals.

On the other hand, we did find a solution to these problems: Strategic Management.

Strategic Management

Strategic management is the ongoing planning, monitoring, analysis and assessment of all that is necessary for an organization to meet its goals and objectives.

At Secure Group we decided to use Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard that we keep in the WebBSC. This allowed us to easily tell the story and create the right context by:
- Communicating what we are trying to accomplish: complete top-to-bottom strategic visibility for everyone (driving company-wide understanding)
- Aligning everyone’s day-to-day work with strategy
- Prioritizing projects, products, and services
- Measuring and monitoring progress towards strategic targets: Goal-based processes, KPI-measurement, and data visualization across the company.

Each department has its own Strategic Map and Balanced Scorecard.

Because of that, it's possible to say:
- When strategy and goals are clear, specific and broadly understood...
- When team interactions are focused on strategy and goals, rather than tactics...
- When management time is transparent, articulate and perceptive...

... we achieve the ideal scenario of "Context, Not Control" which leads to the high alignment, performance and impact we need to create a great product!

However, to ensure security in all aspects, there're some situations where control is required, for example, to prevent irrevocable risks like the possibility of data breaches, when people are still learning because they need mentoring (junior employees / Levels 1 and 2) and when we encounter Moral, Ethical and Legal Issues (escalated conflicts).

Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard Model suggests the organization is viewed from four perspectives, and that objectives, measures (KPIs), targets, and initiatives (actions) should be developed for each of these:

- Financial: this considers organizational financial performance and the use of financial resources;

- Customer/Stakeholder: this views organizational performance from the opinion of the customer or other key stakeholders that the organization is designed to serve;

- Internal Process: reviews organizational performance through the lenses of quality and efficiency related to our product, services, or other key business processes;

- Organizational Capacity (originally called Learning and Growth): looks at organizational performance through the areas of human capital, infrastructure, technology, culture and other capacities that are key to breakthrough performance.

The system that hosts our Balanced Scorecards is called WebBSC and it connects the dots between our big picture strategy elements such as:
- Mission (our purpose)
- Vision (what we aspire to)
- Core values (what we believe in),
- Strategic focus areas (themes, results and/or goals)

and the more tactical operational elements such as:

- Objectives (continuous improvement activities)
- Measures (KPIs to track strategic performance),
- Targets (our desired level of performance),
- Initiatives (projects that help you reach your targets).

Each department has its own Strategic Map and Balanced Scorecard. Here you can check the structure:

Jira

The tool we use for managing projects in Secure Group is Jira. We use the system in such a way that no matter which tasks our employees are working on, everyone has the visibility of which part of the strategy it's been affected.
The Jira projects, Kanban boards and Scrum boards are distributed as follow:

• Department projects: consist of tasks related to the relevant department processes' improvement. All tasks are linked to an initiative, strategic goal, strategic map, strategic theme, and the relation graph can be seen in the tickets.
• Process projects: consist of tasks related to cross-department processes and are usually used company-wide
• Product projects: consist of tasks related to all of our products such as bug fixing, development of new features, product stories, and improvements.

Culture Code

Once we have developed the context, we need our people to be inspired by the same values as us. We embrace diversity.
Being innovative requires people from different backgrounds with different ideas, and we want to get the best from everyone. To achieve this we need to share the same set of corporate values, regardless of background.
We want to work with smart, like-minded people who understand and respect this, and who are aligned with our values and that's why we created our Culture Code.
Оur Culture Code is built on 7 essential permission to play values that we believe are essential to our business model. Permission to play means exactly that: minimum standards of behavior we expect within our “free to create” environment.

We only hire people that demonstrate these values, and we don’t tolerate employees who don’t exhibit these values:

• Responsibility
• Devotion to Learning
• Remarkability
• Respect
• Collaboration
• Adaptiveness
• Innovation

We are all human, though, and prone to mistakes from time to time. Occasionally during hiring, someone who is not a good culture fit will slip through the net. We needed a way to manage these culture mismatch scenarios because you may be a high performer at a technical level, but what if you don’t embrace our culture? We believe it is fair to give all employees a second chance We work to the premise that people can change – and we developed a process called the Corrective Action Plan (CAP) to manage this. The CAP also provides a last opportunity to reflect if Secure Group is right for you

We have seen that by setting the right context our employees can understand our mission and vision and create a great product. The leadership style in the company supports this. It moves management and people interactions away from “controlling activities” and toward synergistic relationships between team members.

Do's and Don'ts

Culture Code
Value	Description	What we believe	What is expected	What is not expected
Responsibility	Takes responsibility for actions, products, and decisions within the scope of his/her position, and carries out work plans.	Our aim is to create a thriving community of responsible professionals that will be given the freedom to take ownership and accountability of projects and processes and implement their personal approaches to drive tangible results for the organization.	Has a responsibility to deliver superior value to customers, employees, shareholders, and partners	Lack of engagement with the company and the product itself
				Slacks during working hours and is not able to deliver any value
			Follows process, methodology, and policies with security in mind to protect the integrity of our system and the personal information of partners and clients	In contact with former employees that have litigation against the integrity of our company/customers
				Shares confidential information
				Is always late and does not compensate for lost working hours
			Delivers quality work on time	Does not work
				Is constantly behind schedule
			Prioritizes well and works according to plan	Does not prioritize
				Makes decisions without considering the strategy of the company/department
				Does side jobs during working hours
Devotion to Learning	Has a passion for his/her craft and constantly strives for self-improvement.	Knowledge is a driving value for us and thus we're searching for information-hunters who're constantly looking to develop themselves and set the bar higher with each day.	Lifelong learner for whom improvement is part of his/her mission	Doesn’t seek knowledge
				Is reactive to learning new things
			Actively and independently seeks knowledge to solve any issue in his/her domain	Expects the others to devise answers
			Willing to reinvent his/her approach when necessary	Has a negative attitude towards obtaining new knowledge
Remarkability	Does everything using his/her unparalleled skillset in his/her specific field.	A core mission for us as an employer is to facilitate an environment that puts talent under the spotlight and inspires self-improvement. This is why we seek to attract field-experts and give them the freedom to implement growth-hack approaches and to enrich others within the company.	Has at least one “superpower” – a skill or know-how for which he/she is unrivaled	Does not invest time and doesn’t show interest in developing his/her superpower
			Produces remarkable work output	Is comfortable with stagnation and stays mediocre
Respect	Comes to work with a selfless and respectful mindset.	Our employees are open-minded individuals, driven by the desire to help the vision for a data-secured digital world of Secure Group to reach and engage more people.	Is open, respectful and honest in every interaction at all levels	Is mean to colleagues
				Makes fun behind other employees’ backs
				Calls the others derogative names
				Lies for the sake of his/her credibility
			Approaches individual and team tasks with humility	Approaches tasks and new projects with arrogance and/or superiority
				Constantly shows no respect for the ideas/knowledge of others
			Willing to change his/her opinion/position for the greater good	Wants to force his/her opinion on the group
			Does not allow his/her views and ideas to dominate	Always wants to dominate
				Always wants to be right
			Does not disseminate opinions that violate the company's reputation or the work of his/her colleagues	Constantly blames others for his/her mistakes
Collaboration	Employees must share knowledge to make our sum greater than its parts.	We're looking for true team members that are eager to join and contribute to a larger cause and understand that goals could only be achieved collaboratively.	Shares knowledge	Hoards knowledge
			Assists others when necessary	Does not assist others
				Assists in an unproductive way
			Communicates effectively and timely with peers	Does not communicate well
				Does not make an effort to build good working relationships with colleagues
			Exhibits openness to feedback	Takes feedback in a negative and/or personal way
Adaptiveness	In the dynamic world of technology and communications, professionals need to be flexible.	As a product company and worldwide industry leader, we're an active part of the innovation race. That's why are looking for masters of flexibility that can adapt well to market changes and are battle-hardened sailors in the sea of uncertainty and instability.	Constantly grows his/her skill set to cope with unforeseen changes	Does not undertake efforts to grow
				Avoids learning
			Responds efficiently to changes in the work environment	Does not use opportunities to adapt
			Copes well with uncertainty and instability	Takes change negatively
Innovation	Employee must bring new ideas and concepts to the products and processes; must seek to improve constantly	Here we give everyone the creative freedom they need to break out of the box, get inspired, and come up with wildly innovative solutions.	Displays creative and critical thinking skills	Sticks to outdated methods and does not bring innovative solutions
			Proactive, develops proposals	Reactive, is negative about innovation
			Promotes and implements new ideas by setting up the right procedures and process	Does not build/structure any process
				Sets up procedures that are wrong or not applicable

CAP

Whenever one employee doesn't show adherence to our Culture Code or falls for one of the non-desirable attitudes, we provide a Corrective Action Plan - CAP in order to try to fix it.

The CAP is our tool to correct some behaviors or attitudes that need improving, based on the values displayed in our Culture Code.

You may be a high performer at a technical level, but what if you don’t embrace our culture? We believe it is fair to give all employees a second chance.

We work to the premise that people can change – and we developed a process called Corrective Action Plan (CAP) to manage this. The CAP also provides a last opportunity to reflect if Secure Group is right for you.

Below you can see the structure of the CAP. If no quick change is seen, we proceed to contract termination because keeping people who are a bad culture fit stops us from achieving success.