Building Award-Winning Culture at Andela; Part 1
Last Tuesday, the results of Jobberman’s Best Companies to Work for in Nigeria survey came out and Andela was ranked #1 in Nigeria. It still feels surreal and this feeling took me down memory lane.
Jobberman presented the award for Best Company to Work for in Nigeria to Andela at their EPIC Tower office. L-R: Sola Obagbemi — Communications Manager, Andela; Seni Sulyman — Vice President, Global Operations, Andela; Odunayo Okusi — PR & Campaign Manager, Jobberman Nigeria; Taiwo Judah-Ajayi — Senior Director of People, Andela; Adesina Ogidan — Lead Consultant, The Africa Talent Company; Lucy Santos — Facilities Assistant, Andela; Kingdom-Isaac Orjiewuru — Developer, Andela; Abiodun Laaro — Executive Coordinator, Andela.
I joined Andela in late 2015. At the time, we hadn’t gone through the impressive (series B and C) fundraising rounds, Mark Zuckerberg was yet to visit us in our then Yabacon valley abode, and we were just over a hundred employees in Lagos. I wanted a fresh career challenge and I felt there was something special (almost magical) about Andela even in the early days. However, was joining a somewhat unknown start-up the answer?
The final leg of my interview was the clue — I was invited to a games night with Andela staff, including the COO, E (one of the co-founders) and a few other Directors and Co-founders. It was an interesting night — in between games and puzzles, different Andelans asked about my experience and interests. It was the strangest final interview I’ve ever had. It felt like I was hanging out with a bunch of friends and family. That was when I knew I was home. The passionate, fun and authentic culture exuded by Andelans had me hooked.
I remember going to the office on my first day of work with my pictures and knick-knacks only to be ushered to a corner by the door! To think that I was expecting an office all to myself, LOL! The last time I worked in a pool was eons ago, but I took it in stride and very quickly found the flat structure in Andela quite effective.
2016 started with interesting and intense conversations about our business and a change in leadership in Lagos. It was a period of uncertainty but everyone at Andela Nigeria and beyond had a laser focus on doing their part to foster our mission. It was a remarkable year because we realised that for us to remain successful, we not only needed to scale our business, we also needed to scale our culture. If we were going to change the narrative of what a software engineer looks like and present new models of Hijab-donning, non-fraudster software developers, we had to put in a little more work to build a deliberate culture that supports our strategic objectives. Thus, we had to put in the hard work of crafting scalable processes, business continuity policies, implementing and iterating on performance management frameworks, and at the same time, creating time and space for employee engagement through all-hands meetings, offsites and after-hour socials. In June of 2016, we raised a Series B funding round led by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative which paved the way for Mark Zuckerberg’s visit in August. Hundreds of people joined Andela, we did our first SOC II audit and it seemed like the world was starting to notice us.
Our EPIC Tower Office, before and after the renovation.
We started 2017 on a high note with our move to our current abode, EPIC Tower. The Operations team had worked through the year-end holidays to create a space that Andelans and the world over would love and thrive in.
Then the results of the hard work in 2016 and prior began to roll in: We won the US Secretary of State’s Award for Corporate Excellence and we were ranked #8 in the Jobberman 100 best companies to work for in 2016. From not being on the list to being in the top 10, we were almost beside ourselves and I remember making a flippant and ridiculous remark that we were eyeing the top spot. For the rest of the year, we continued to work on our culture. It was immensely important to us that as we grow and integrate new people into our community that we preserve the ideals of our community, otherwise it would be the same story as other companies who started out with a lot of promise but fizzled out. It was hard work and a lot of intense conversations true to our practice of ‘challenging each other but parting as friends’.
Looking back, I think that paranoia, the fear of not just failure but extinction served us. Our actions were constantly (and still are) evaluated through the lens of our EPIC Values: Excellence, Passion, Integrity and Collaboration. If we’re going to maintain the revolution that started in the streets of Lagos, New York, Kampala, Accra, San Francisco and Nairobi, we need to truly live our values every day, even with the high influx of people every month. To put this into context, at the end of 2017, we had almost doubled our size, so maintaining a consistent and effective culture (especially in a distributed environment) was and still is no small feat.
#ThisIsAndela
Looking forward to a better version of you and I. Follow my tweets via @teajaya.
About Taiwo Judah-Ajayi
Taiwo Judah-Ajayi is the Senior Director of People at Andela. She is responsible for Global and Africa People Management Support. She was formerly Director of People at Andela Nigeria. Her former role is now open. To apply, please use this link: https://careers.andela.com/job/1114070
