How We’ve Managed Growth Pains With Transparency & Communication
While transparency is continually deemed to be one of the most important pieces of a positive corporate culture, I’ve come to realize it’s still a very elusive and subjective term. Many companies struggle with becoming more transparent and as they continue to grow, keeping transparency as a core tenant of culture becomes exponentially harder. At each stage of growth, a different type of communication structure is needed to relate to the changing dynamics of relationships and understanding of a changing team.
This is an extremely important part of making EventMobi the type of place that people love working at and we’ve evolved through many trials of addressing our continual growing pains as a company growing 2x year-over-year for 4+ years.
My goal as a founder has always been to reduce the need of micromanagement by ensuring everyone is well informed with the happenings internally and externally of the company. Give our team the same insights that I’ve built, and trust them to make the right decisions.
However, at a rapidly growing startup, insights, strategy & approach, and responding to change creates havoc on the team. We focused on addressing our growth pains by building a transparent culture through filling in the gaps of what individuals want and care to know more about, and making sure communication lines are always easy and open. The last thing you want when you’re sprinting towards your next milestone is to confuse and disrupt your team with overbearing, useless tidbits of excessive info or info that doesn’t have the right context attached to it.
Here are some approaches that worked well for our engineering team through our growth periods.
Do Less, Do More, Continue Doing
This was an approach we took when we were small — less than 20 in the whole product development department and everyone was fairly familiar with what everyone else’s work was.
Every other week, we’d take 30 min out of the last part of our Friday, and have everyone gather for a discussion on how we could be better. I’d start by giving the department on my view of the product & industry, things that have come up for the business (outside of product/engineering) the past 2 weeks and then wrap up by drawing up on the whiteboard 3 columns: Do Less, Do More, Continue Doing. We’d hand out post-it notes to every engineer, designer & product manager and have them spend 5 minutes encouraging each person to write at least 1 post-it for each column:
- What should we do less of as a team
- What should we do more of as a team
- What is working well that we should double down on and continue focusing on
A frenzy of post-its would fill the wall, and I’d take time quickly organizing them into themes and talking through every single point that was raised. It was great for people to see that their ideas & issues were being immediately addressed by management.
We’d group up the biggest takeaways that we could take action on and that would turn into a task list for myself for the next 2 weeks. I’d review that list, and our progress at the beginning of the next meeting and see how far we’d come!
Being able to see the progress, notice how big recurring issues have disappeared, & having issues addressed out in the open by management showed the team how much we were committed to making our environment a better, safer, and more productive place to work.
We’d then roll out our drinks & beers and celebrate a week well done :)
And Then It Broke™
As we grew to 80 employees and ~30 in the product development group, new staff weren’t sure how to incorporate themselves into this process. For the sake of having the meeting not run too long, many would omit their ideas or only discuss surface level issues. It started to become a chore.
On top of this, the company had grown to a maturity where spreading every piece of news and keeping everyone 100% in sync was neither possible or useful. My interactions as a CTO with each individual had become less personable over time, and most of our new staff saw me as a boss vs a peer which cut some major arteries in open communication. We needed a better communication structure that would be able to address cross-team issues and filter out the noise.
We had to refocus on other approaches that would help us address our main goals
- Build trust between management & staff to open communication paths
- Ensure people feel open & comfortable in raising issues they are seeing
- Building the culture that every issue is important. If it’s important to you, it’s important to the company
- Showcase how feedback is being heard and what is being done about it
- Being able to immediately address & clear up gossip and confusion
Smaller Scale Retrospectives
We had to surface issues in ways that individuals were most comfortable voicing them. Our department wide retrospective had run it’s course and we needed more intimate approach to get detailed discussions on issues and opportunities we should address as a team.
The perfect avenue was one where we were already assessing for continuous feedback — our team specific agile retrospectives. Our teams had trust inherently built into them and a comfort level of communication that allowed us to make sure everyone was able to surface their voice without worry.
Management Sprints & Open Progress Board
The success of this open and more free-flowing communication allowed our agile coach to gather everything that would come up across teams, and place them on a management focused Trello board. The goal to visualize the feedback openly across the department and have management comment on, prioritize and give updates to asynchronously.
The managers would meet once a week, discuss the status of the board and treat this just as if we it were a product we were developing. We would set up the week of work to be done based on the incoming issues, create goals and outcomes and have them transparent for the department to see and to be accountable against. It became easy for everyone to follow along if they wanted to know what management was working on or thinking at any time.
During a bi-weekly Engineering Demo-Day presentation, we run a town hall (Q+A’s to the founders) and then review all the progress management has made just like how we would demo and review progress of any of our product teams during this meeting.
It’s important that management is not seen as a level up from the engineers. We’re not there to control them and their work, but we’re a different group that work laterally to ensure their success. Doing demos and showing our work to the team regularly, helps maintain that relationship.
In giving our team a visible voice, these exercises have helped significantly in bringing back a sense of trust, openness and shared understanding that was very easy to lose as we continued to grow. While it’s still not perfect, the push to continually force ourselves to try to create programs to address our goals in transparency. It helps make sure there is mutual trust with management, our culture stays open & inclusive, and we keep communication lines as open and free-flowing as possible.
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