Launching SafetyCulture Community

Pictured: Melcar McCaig and Mirei Sakurai, co-organisers of SafetyCulture Community (left), and attendees on the night (right).

Earlier this year, SafetyCulture opened the doors to our HQ in the heart of Surry Hills. After two years of lockdowns and restrictions on in person gatherings, we were so keen to share this inspiring new space, and knew that it was the right time to reinvigorate the meetups community.

“If there’s anything the pandemic has taught us, it’s that we’re humans and humans are social in nature. We thrive from collaboration and connection with others.” — Melcar McCaig, Director of Engineering

So, we created the SafetyCulture Community. We wanted to share about SafetyCulture, how we operate and our working principles, as well as to hear from other experts in the industry. It was also important for us to give back to the community, and to share our Surry Hills HQ with local professionals.

To kick off our launch, we hosted our first event focused on all things Quality Engineering. Our QE Night featured three speakers; two were quality experts from well known tech companies, and we also had one of our distinguished software engineers featured in a fireside chat.

Pictured: Roger Chapman, Distinguished Engineer and Alty Shomanova, Senior QE and fireside host.

This was the format:

• 5.30pm — 6.15pm Light dinner, drinks, networking
• 6.15pm — 6.45pm Talk #1: Your AppSec Blindspot by Edwin Kwan from Tyro
• 6.45pm — 7.15pm Talk #2: Quality Engineering at Dovetail Studios by Georgia de Pont
• 7.30pm — 8pm Talk #3: Fireside chat with Roger Chapman from SafetyCulture
• 8pm — 8.30pm Drinks, networking

As this was our first meetup event, we spent quite a bit of time planning — the key to our success. We let our speakers choose the content they wanted to present, and the only guidance we gave them was to talk about a topic within Quality Engineering that could interest a wide group of tech professionals. This made it easier for us to find speakers who were eager to present on the night.

We were extremely lucky to have a dedicated Workplace Experience team to help the planning come together, a team of talented chefs cooking up a hot dinner, and an AV Specialist to make sure everything ran smoothly on the night. We couldn’t have delivered such an engaging event without them, and are thankful to all those who were involved.

The night was a huge success, with over 100 attendees. People were eager to ask questions, and we had a great atmosphere going. The Mexican fiesta we served, and our office bar with beer and wine on tap, as well as a selection of non alcoholic drinks probably helped with the vibe as well.

Attendees from the night.

As will all first-times, we have a few learnings we’ve taken note of.

Our learnings

• Keep events in-person. We initially designed the meetup as a hybrid event, with live Zoom streaming for those who preferred to stay at home. This however, made it difficult to know how many people to cater food and drinks for, so we made the decision to make it an in-person event only. This also extends to our speakers. We found that people were more engaged with the two live speakers we had, and it also gave attendees an opportunity to network afterwards with them. Seeing everyone in the SafetyCulture space was a thrill, and created a great sense of community.
• Dedicate ample time after the speaker sessions for networking. Our event featured three speakers in a three hour timeframe. We had allocated networking time before and after the event, but didn’t anticipate the many questions that came up off the back of each speaker’s session. This meant that sessions ran longer than expected, and there was minimal networking time at the end. Our next event will feature only one or two topics, but give plenty of time for Q&A and networking.
• Tell your own story. External attendees are almost always interested in getting to know your company, product, and mission. We showcased this through one of our own speakers in a fireside chat, and actually found that attendees were most engaged in this session. We’ll be sure to keep having SafetyCulture staff as speakers who can talk about how we do things here.

Overall, we’re super pleased with how our first SafetyCulture Community meetup turned out, and can’t wait to present more. We currently have a number of meetups in planning mode on topics such as leadership, product development, customer support, and backend engineering, so keep an eye out on our meetup page and we hope to see you there.