Bluff your way to a better organization
Based on “Every Business Can Be a Technology Business,” presented at OSCON 2015.
If you have a responsibility for hiring people, at any level, you have one superpower that can change the future culture and direction of your organization: tell your new hires that the company already is the way you wish it were.
New employees are a blank slate. They’re anxious to learn the cultural norms of their new environment and impress you, their new boss. They trust you completely. I’m advising you to stretch that truth, just a bit, in service of a better organization.
If you work at a modern web business, you probably think a lot about two metrics: customer acquisition rate and churn. Acquisition is the rate at which new people join, and churn is the rate at which they leave.
In broad discussions about company culture, the focus is usually on “churn”, or in this context, employee attrition — retaining great talent. Measuring and preventing excessive attrition is important and well worth pursuing, but don’t neglect the other metric. You can bluff your way to a better company by zeroing-in on acquisition and early employee experience. If a company is growing, by definition you’re adding more people than are leaving. Given that attrition is almost never zero (especially in an organization of any moderate size), the ratio of new-to-established employees will grow even faster than you might think.
I stumbled on this in my role at Safari early on. Several of us worked remotely, far from the head office, and I didn’t like that a lot of company meetings started late because it meant we were bored and lonely on calls by ourselves. So when I onboarded new engineers, I wrote the following in their “welcome to the company” document:
Safari culture is to be very, very prompt for meetings. We really like to start on time, not a 5 minute rolling start. Default meeting length is 20 minutes.
This wasn’t exactly true. But because I was their boss and was always on time, and because their peers (who’d been similarly indoctrinated) were always on time, and because my team was the fastest-growing in the company, suddenly lots of people were always on time, and individuals who were consistently late became the minority. We never actually had to send a cranky all-company email saying, “Don’t be late to meetings, it’s disrespectful,” because the value of timely meetings is obvious once it becomes the norm. (And you look like a jerk if you walk into too many meetings that started without you.) Eventually, a plurality of people at the company had the collective belief that meetings start promptly and that it had always been so.
We doubled down on this hack and integrated the idea throughout our onboarding process:
- Each hiring manager was responsible for tweaking the “welcome to the company” document for their new hire, modifying the cultural norms to address emergent problems.
- If multiple new hires started simultaneously, we formally paired them up through the process and then held a retrospective on their onboarding once they settled in, to collectively assess how we did.
- Managers surveyed their teams several times a year to ask what they’d like to see improved in the company, and then co-opted the newbies to help effect change.
Of course, this is not really an invitation to lie to new employees. Don’t make up untruths out of whole cloth, or make concrete promises you can’t possibly keep. Tell a new employee about cultural guidelines that at least you and your immediate team exemplify: “We respect a diversity of opinions”, “We’re courteous and kind,” “We try to help others before ourselves.” And then keep doing them until they are true.
