How Norwegian robotics maker AutoStore spread its small-town identity across the globe

Palmer figures he’s worked with or studied hundreds of companies in his 20-plus years as a globe-trotting organizational consultant. AutoStore, he says, “is one of my five favorite cultures of all time.” He cites its “off the charts” employee Net Promoter Score. A score above 50 is considered excellent in this standard metric used to measure worker satisfaction and engagement. Apple has an eNPS of 20, according to Comparably, a workplace culture and compensation monitoring site owned by ZoomInfo. Google’s is 38 and Costco’s 46. AutoStore recently registered a 79. It’s the kind of score that explains the company’s stunningly low annual attrition rate of 1.5%. (By comparison, the tech industry in the United States experienced attrition rates that topped 20% on average in 2020, according to various surveys.)“What AutoStore’s success proves is that the challenges of spreading your culture can be an opportunity and not a problem,” Rodgers says. “So much of their success is linked to the strength of their culture.”

AutoStore’s founding story is rooted in a happy accident. In the 1990s, the homegrown Hatteland Electronics reigned as the largest supplier of computer components in Scandinavia. As it ran out of space in its warehouse, the company’s technical director, Ingvar Hognaland, floated the idea in the form of a riddle.“He asks me, ‘What do we have more of in the warehouse than anything else?’” recalls Synnøve Matre, a software engineer at Hatteland who still works at AutoStore. Matre (a distant relative of Anette) floated some answers. Computer chips? Transistors? Hognaland had something else in mind. “He says, ‘Air,’” Matre says. “‘The problem is that there’s too much air.’” That was the seed for AutoStore’s cube storage system, where robots motor along on tracks to pick up items, and which has grown into the densest order-fulfillment technology in existence.“Most people thought it was crazy,” Matre says. “I thought it was such a cool idea and a super interesting challenge.”

Lier, who was Hatteland’s CFO at the time, greenlit the project. “The culture has always been very open-minded in search of creative solutions,” he says. “And when we see something that we believe in, we invest in it,” he adds. By 1999, the team had a prototype. The following year, the family behind Hatteland’s computer parts business sold the business and reinvested much of the proceeds into AutoStore.While AutoStore got its first customer outside of Norway in 2010, and its first in the United States in 2012, it wasn’t until 2017 that it began opening up outposts around the globe. At the time, the company had 150 workers distributed between Nedre Vats, Oslo, and a manufacturing facility in Poland. Today, it employs 760 people across 13 countries and has roughly 600 customers in more than 40 countries.

To Isabel Rocher, the company’s regional director for southern Europe, Lier’s transparency, and the openness required of every manager, helps cleanse the environment of politics. “When you see that you can talk freely, you feel trusted, you feel heard, and you feel empowered, and then people can commit [to a decision] much more easily,” says Rocher, who is based in France.Lean is the final of the three-word statement of principles. “We don’t overcomplicate things,” says Merete Matre. “You keep it simple for partners, for customers, for suppliers.” In the early years especially, that meant saying no to a lot of customers because AutoStore refused to customize its system. “We have such a flexible, good solution that you don’t need that,” says Lier, adding that AutoStore’s team remains small relative to the size of its business.“Theirs is a culture rooted in self-reliance, which I understand is a very Norwegian philosophy,” says Ram Trichur, who serves on the AutoStore board of directors. “A fundamental belief in self-reliance is a very useful trait to have in the current environment,” Trichur adds, noting some of the challenges facing companies over the past several years, including a global pandemic and disruptions in the supply chain.

Those charged with evangelizing AutoStore’s culture say that begins long before someone’s first day on the job.“When we hire people, if we don’t believe that they fit into the culture, even if they are the best from a skill point of view, we would never hire them,” says Lier. “The most important criteria is the right fit.”To assess that fit, job candidates are asked to take a survey that explores such topics as how they like to work, what motivates them, and how they like to be supported. Their answers are benchmarked against the responses of 190 AutoStore employees.“It gives us an early indication of potential discrepancies,” says Anette Matre. During interviews, prospective hires are often asked straight out how they would feel working at a place where anyone can talk to anyone as a peer and where every voice is respected.The acculturation process continues during the onboarding of new hires. “We say very clearly that we don’t only care about the results that you’re achieving,” Anette Matre says. “We are also concerned about how you achieve them, and that has to be in line with our values.”

Cultural fit is also a key measuring stick during employee reviews and is central to any feedback offered. Collaboration and initiative—addressing problems rather than assuming they’re someone else’s purview—are strongly encouraged. “You will not find anyone going home when a customer is in trouble,” Anette Matre says.There’s been no set roadmap for opening a new office. Sometimes AutoStore hires a manager locally. Other times they dispatch an experienced hand from Norway. One constant, though, is that the company always identifies a cultural ambassador—someone who is not only steeped in the company’s ways, but also has an ability to proactively engage with coworkers around them—whose role is to lead by example and to advocate for the company’s values.AutoStore also works hard to ensure that those outside of Norway don’t feel as if they work in satellites charged with carrying out orders dispatched from the mothership. “There’s a real family feel to working here,” says Delap, who works in New Hampshire as part of a close-knit international marketing team spread across three continents. “While you have your team here, you’re communicating and collaborating with others across the globe.” AutoStore leans heavily on Microsoft Teams and on Meta’s Workplace app to foster easy communication among its geographically dispersed employees.

The pandemic presented additional challenges for AutoStore during a period of unprecedented growth for the company. Normally, AutoStore would fly key new employees to Nedre Vats to spend time with colleagues, but that became impractical. Also in normal times, people on the human resources and recruiting side of the company would visit AutoStore outposts around the globe to see how each office was faring. “We are believers in communication, lots and lots of it,” says Merete Matre. During the pandemic, AutoStore implemented what it called its Mystery Coffee program, which randomly pairs employees for 30-minute virtual sessions with colleagues in a different country.Expansion to different locations came with its unique challenges. In 2018, the company sent one of its top engineers to open its first U.S. office in Derry, New Hampshire. (There’s now a second one in Denver.) But the employee proved not to be the cultural ambassador AutoStore needed in a country where many people are acutely aware of the consequences of speaking out of turn to a superior at work.“I think a lot of people in the U.S. like the way we behave,” says Lier. “The challenge is to get them not to think the way they normally would in the workplace.”Eventually, the company bolstered its footprint with another cultural ambassador who quickly cut out the corrosive distraction of simmering office politics. “The ‘open door, speak your mind’ policy is sometimes hard for Americans to get used to,” says Delap, who was the fifth employee hired in the U.S.