Engineering Culture Improvement Action Items
This is Part 3/3 of the Engineering Culture series. Here is Part 1 and Part 2.
In this section, we will provide actionable insights on how to change your company’s culture, assuming you have already acknowledged the need for change (see Part 2) and have a clear vision of your target state (see Part 1).
First and foremost, it is important to note that culture cannot be scripted. While regulations, policies, and process descriptions may describe some cultural applications, they only cover a small subset. Usually, we think about the “culture” when we want an engineer to do the right actions in “unpredictable” situations. These “unpredictables” also include ones that may look quite normal from engineers’ perspective: like discovering trending down feature adoption rate, or seeing suspicious spikes on the IOPS dashboard. I would better call them “unactionable” situations, but we want the culture to make them “actionable” for engineers.
Ergo: we need to train engineers to “recognize & act” in an appropriate situation first. What can be done here:
- Focus on the positive. Identify and/or “organize” reference case studies: when engineers or teams have demonstrated their adherence to cultural principles or values.
- Keep track of identified reference case studies with a repository structured by principles and values.
- Establish a positive reinforcement system (see below).
- Set up a communication channel (maybe even literally a Slack channel) for related discussions. It can be tricky to keep it unmuted by the majority of engineers, though :) A community of culture can mitigate that (see below).
- Have a community of culture, driven by “champions” in charge of developing subsets of values/principles to resolve a potential bottleneck.
- Keep cadence of meetups/sync-ups discussing current progress towards “ideal state.”
- Gather feedback and implement a fit-to-purpose tooling according to it: help engineers to demonstrate their culture, and you get their trust (sooner or later). Tooling thoughts are listed in the next sections.
As you can see, some suggestions are impossible to implement without executive support, but most are generally available even to a team lead level. So feel free to improve an Engineering Culture in your team, department, track, tribe, unit, or whole company! ;)
Below you can find some more details of the abovementioned points.
Positive Reinforcement Learning
is an important part of training. Typical ways of setting up an engineering culture reinforcement are:
- Publicly announce promotions and hiring events, and have explicit reference case studies as a core part of such announcements. “Engineer John Wick was able to demonstrate an “Ownership” value — he’s prevented a server downtime by escalating infra warnings from sentry logs with the Platform team, and contributed to the fix implementation”
- Have these cases as a topic of 1:1 agenda.
- Have these cases as topics of peer review (and self-review) agenda.
- Have these cases as topics of the hiring interview agenda.
- *Make it a source of fun :) It might be a full-scale gamification engine adoption or just funny posts on Slack — but positive emotion catalyzes the learning process.
And, of course, there are more than that, do not limit yourself to these sample points :)
Negative Reinforcement Learning
A special note about “negative case studies” (missed opportunities, failed deliveries, server downtime, etc) — they are powerful learning drivers but must be handled very carefully. General rules of thumb are simple: only the one who made a mistake can communicate a case (like a “postmortem”), and it should be performed voluntarily.
Enabling Tools
Culture-enabling tooling is very context-dependent on what principles and values you are going to build, but a generic list may include but is not limited to the following:
- Budgets for 3rd-party software for experiments with self-service software, e.g. analytics, chatbots, track & trace, knowledge management, etc. It can give your engineers visible support in doing the right things and make it easier for you to find and highlights success stories around such experiments;
- The reserved capacity of the Platform team / DevExperience team for in-house automations backlog based on ideas from engineers for culture-enabling purposes;
- The reserved teams capacity for culture-related experiments; can also be a regular hackathon or similar freestyle event;
- Engineering blog with professional editor helping to shape stories from engineers for engineers;
Thank you for reading! Hope my thoughts can become a source of your own inspiration.
