Building the Culture to build Systems
Part 1 – The Badges
If there’s one thing we could name that differentiates a good team from a great one, it’s culture. It’s not something you can buy, it’s something you need to build, grow and nurture over time.
So how do you build the right culture?
It is very much like asking “how do you keep in shape?” First you need to set the goals you want to achieve and then you need to start exercising, but remember it is an effort that never ends – once you stop investing in it and not using it, you will lose it.
First – setting the goals, i.e. defining the values
You need to set goals, so you will know what to focus on, and as we are dealing with culture – the goals are actually the values you want to adopt and enforce.
For us some of the values and behaviours we want to emphasize are: collaboration, learning, fun, getting out of your comfort zone, initiative, excellence.
Once you have that defined you can start working out! In this post, and others to come, we will share some of the exercises we use to make sure we stay in shape.
Exercise 1 – The Badges
We created several sets of badges to enforce selected behaviours and celebrate occasions. Those badges are been handed out during weekly group sync meetings, and can also be added to mail signatures if one desires so. They also makes a nice collection, and naturally there are common and rare variants. We’ve found that this drives conversation and directly affects culture.
A few examples of the badges sets:
The Tech Collection:
We wanted to encourage using different tech tools, like Vagrant, improve Chef quality, killing tech debt etc. – so we made sure we have appropriate badges:
The Production Collection:
At the end of the day we are all dealing with production – and we want to celebrate that.
We created several badges for all kind of production related happenings, whether you have broken production, or spend a sleepless night – you will get mentioned. Seeing a senior engineer being granted a “broken prod” badge, drives our “blameless” culture, but still carries the weight of responsibility. No one wants a whole set of black badges!
The Celebration Collection:
We like to celebrate – whether it is the first on-call shift, the fact that one presented in a conference, arranged a meetup, or just helped a colleague out. By celebrating behaviors we value, we drive people to adopt them. Here are a few examples:
The “Jewish Mother” Collection:
Adding a good laugh is always nice, and at the end of the day we all have our quirky behaviours. By celebrating them we keep smiling… and strengthen tolerance.
It is a living exercise and we keep on adding badges as we move along. In fact, we have our own engineers suggest and even create them. Our experience so far shows that gamifying culture-building activities has a positive effect on team atmosphere, and direct effect on the specific behaviors we address.
Stay tuned for additional exercises in How to Keep Your Culture in Shape.
