Beyond the shiny: a glimpse into culture at Shopify
About four years ago I stumbled into a job with no formal job description and that included something I didn’t understand – culture. When people asked, I struggled to explain what I did. It was easier to describe some of the tangible tasks so I would describe my role in planning out our office space (“oh, so you’re an interior designer?”) or throwing a kickass celebration (“ah! So you’re a party planner!”). But over time, as our company evolved and grew, so did my understanding of culture. Because my job was so open ended, I took it as an incredible opportunity to define culture at Shopify. I slowly took on projects of personal interest: encouraging peer recognition and innovation, bringing new hires up to speed, etc.
With a whole lot of personal development coupled with Shopify being the perfect playground to experiment and learn in, today I can confidently say that the culture team (we’re a whole team now!) purposefully designs holistic employee experiences. And while it’s still hard to concisely summarize everything that we do, here’s some of the things that have us fired up lately:
- Creating an internal ‘default to open’ environment. We believe people inherently want to do meaningful work and see the impact they have. We create space and programming so employees have the context they need to stay autonomous and make the right decisions. We run weekly town halls based out of different offices, and host the Shopify Summit, a two-day event not just to give us direction for the year, but also to ask our employees how we’ll work together to get there.
- Onboarding new employees so they know what to expect, and how to succeed at Shopify. For example, we know the excitement that comes with a new job, priming people to absorb and retain key information, so we start sharing the good stuff right after they sign their employee agreement instead of waiting for their start date.
- Keeping a strong connection with our employees, because how else would we understand our employee’s needs? We stay close to the ground, and focus on building relationships across the board.
- Partnering with other teams. We work with the facilities team to design offices appealing to both introverts and extroverts (more on this soon!) and the IT team to ensure people working remotely always have the ability to tune into anything that’s happening in the office. I could list a ton of examples, but suffice it to say we partner with every department in the company to ensure the employee experience is cohesively considered. The underpinning success factor in all of these partnerships comes from our leadership team. They live true to our values and consistently lead by example.
Of course we also own some of the ‘shiny’ things you might see at #LifeatShopify like holiday parties and employee gifts. And while these things might be Insta-worthy (certainly better than a partnership with our finance team) they are just a taste of what culture looks like at Shopify.
Sound like the kind of place you want to join? Shopify and the culture team are hiring.
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Huge thanks to Shannon O’Brien and Brittany Forsyth.
