Random Observation/Comment #510: When did “culture” become a buzzword again?
Culture is what makes and breaks a company. It’s an underlying mentality that shouldn’t even be a discussion, but yet always comes up as the first thing to fix. Clearly, we want happy people that work together towards getting things done while having a great time doing it. So how do you do that?
- Create a rotation of people to management meetings instead of the same core team
- Grow your own talent and have management invest in their team’s career goals
- Form natural groups and communities based on outside interests
- Let technology work for you – create standing chatrooms for #coffeechats
- Give your employees free coffee – I don’t believe you need to shower us with perks, but coffee is a great motivator and an easy win
- Encourage people to share their network connections
- Give people on your team creative titles like “innovation lead” or “ambassador” (even though everyone will do this at one point anyway
- Encourage people to use open source technologies and stay in touch with the latest
- Allow people to collaborate between teams
- Ask people to give presentations and teach material they know to others
- Start a group that shares geeky news with each other
- Encourage people to ask questions
- Ask management to join and support philanthropy programs – this is a great way to identify high potential candidates
- Create a mentorship program for all levels of employees
- Host a TEDx to share ideas from all levels of employees
- Create groups for common employee hobbies (e.g. photography, scuba diving) that involve connecting outside work
- Encourage teams to start outside work sports groups
- Allow members of your team to attend conferences
- Encourage paired team coding
- Be transparent with firm strategy on architecture and outside vendors
- Recognize people who are doing awesome things for fun inside and outside of work
- Provide budget for team lunches instead of team happy hours
- Provide interesting innovation projects for people to pursue
- Trim the proposals and status update meetings – just build it so you can fail early
- Encourage people to also be tech-savvy – if they don’t know a technology, they should ask developers to give them a dumb-down version of it so they can at least get the lingo without glazing over
- Create a solid routine within the group – grab lunch once a week, grab coffee at the same time a week, play Settlers of Catan after work, host birthday pizza lunches, etc
- Encourage people to network outside of the team and ask them to present debriefs of what other teams are doing
- Provide internal training for courses
- Use wikis to share what you know and which tools you use to make things easier
- Challenge the status quo
I believe the core to solving this problem is realizing that culture is contagious – the best way to spread it is to make people feel involved and important by providing ownership, responsibility, and stake without measuring it so it’s a competition. If you’ve hired good people, they will foster a positive and productive environment.
~See Lemons Love the Culture
