Building Awesome Engineering Culture

No Jargons, Quotes but a practical guide for building awesome engineering culture.

Life of the engineers have moved from cubicle to open offices. Many organizations these days are struggling with employee happiness, growing stress, loosing creativity & retention. And to rescue some using Corporate Trainings, Movie Passes, Yoga, Unlimited snacks, Corporate Outings, Snooker/Pool, Ping-Pong etc etc, but unfortunately this doesn’t promote culture.

Why culture matters?

Culture is environment we create for mutual coexistence for diversified brains. Complex? In short if we have a good culture we just don’t get things done, we get things done well. But Why? Engineers are curious brains & to rescue them there is always a need to Engineering Management to keep them motivated always.

So here start your journey to build dream team,

Building a culture require deep individual understanding.

10 Step Guide can help you in making culture awesome

Hiring & On-boarding Practices

• Communication is the key which help the most in recruiting talent. Have a simple system in place to track applications, scheduling interview & gathering feedback. (Tip: You can manage in Excel/Google Sheets)
• Have a comprehensive Pre-Boarding, On-boarding Guide(Day by Day) for New Joiners whether on-site or off-shore. This gives them a sense of responsibilities need to be fulfilled independently. Make sure that the individual gets familiar with their colleagues. On an average, keep on-boarding exercise for maximum 2 weeks & on its completion have an introduction get-together party.
• Ask for & Give priority to referrals. This shows that your employees trust on you & vice-versa.

Minimize Processes or No Processes

• If Netflix can work without processes every company can. This promotes the ownership.
• Have a proper guidelines when process is required & update documents in regular frequency.
• And this applies to meetings also, make sure meetings are adding values largely else keep stick to emails conversations.

Building Consensus

• Hard decisions should not be taken in flash. Introduce anonymous surveys & work on the result to promote transparency. Metrics seriously helps in taking effective decision
• Promote formal One-on-one(O-3) meetings when there are issues between two people/team.
• Its difficult to be part of every conversation or meeting, to understand problem ask 5 Why’s from each party about problem.

Clear Top-Down KPI

• Engineers love Goal. To give them a goal, the technology department should have clear Key Performance Indicators(KPI) from Top Management for the specific Quarter & those KPI should be sub-divided into each team & role. Also, let people make decisions on how they can reach goal, idea is to promote independent decision making.
• Tech Documentation is annoying for engineers but necessary for organization :) Make this part of Team KPI’s too.

Give special place to critics/dissents

• Accept that some people may have reservation on the decision taken by top management. Instead of ignoring, help people in understanding & be ready for amazing extra-ordinary results
• Ask people again & again whether they understand what’s going in the organization? If no, put a simple white-board, screen, news-letters etc to help them knowing what’s happening the organization & why it matters.

Career Growth Plan for All Roles

• People have lot of aspirations & if your company can fulfill this this will encourage faithfulness.
• Be ready with career growth plan for each level, for each role. Open channels where people can put forward if they want to move to other role, Backend engineer to Mobile Developer, QA to Product etc

Help in Building Individual Identity

• Building a culture require deep individual understanding as every individual in the organization is amazing. It’s difficult to give attention to each individual but they are the company’s face for public.
• As an individual KPI’s, promote open source contribution, Writing Blogs , Attending Meetups & give them a chance to go-out of their regular work to Tech Event/Hackathonor arrange internal meetups etc. The more you support your people, the more they will support organization.

Focus on Productivity rather presence

• The culture is awesome when people are self-driven & push their limits. So, once the work is delegated, people should be given independence in choosing the place to work whether in office or remotely. One of the largest travel company in asia, changed its limited leave policy to unlimited leaves. And results were amazing, the number of leaves came down & employees were happily working on production issues during the Barcelona Holiday Trip because this induced confidence.

Succession Plan for Each Role

• Have a succession plan for each role in the organization to make sure there are no delays in promotion & transition is smooth always. There are cases when somebody promotion are just locked because they have no replacement for current roles.

Engineers- Business Day Out

• Some conversations just cant happen in offices, have a day-out without gadgets for extra-ordinary discussions.
• Present simple statistics the difference people are making in the business & vice-versa help business understanding the tech achievements in easy words.
• Time has changed when office & home have boundaries. We need to understand people more by supporting them in their odd times & pushing them in their best times.

These are key-essential areas identified during my tech journey. But it matters to make people more comfortable & self-driven in their work.