Creating Culture at your organization
One of the talk that caught my attention at AgileIndia conference 2014 was Creating a Global Engineering Culture by Michael Norton Doc who works at Groupon. Below is the summary of the talk -
Groupon quickly grew in number of employees from a single digit to 5 digits in just about 5 years. The organisation now had their development in many parts of the world such as The US, Brazil, India etc. When organisation grows fast, the troubles within the team does too.
1. Lack of mobility - It was a painful process for an employee to move from one project to another.
2. Management issues - Too much pressure from the management on delivering changes that the dev team even felt like not building the features for the product.
3. Motivation - Team motivation was very low which led to attrition.
5. Training - Training employees was becoming a problem - less time to focus, shortage of resources etc
How they resolved these problems?
1. Mobility made easy - The process of mobility of projects for an employee was made hassle free. Just talk to your manager to move into another project.
2. Personal Growth benefits - A budget for each engineer was fixed which could be used to buy training materials.
3. Fun projects funded - Team was encouraged to do their own projects. The management supported a few of the projects by funding them. This in turn motivated employees to collaborate with others and work on creative projects.
4. Cultural activities - Team were encouraged to have activities not just in their centre but with other teams in other parts of the world.
1. By introducing continuous improvement: Start by asking questions - How do you feel working here? What is your life like?
2. Send out survey questions - Create a set of questions. Conduct periodic survey in the organisation. Groupon had a set of 12 questions which was sent monthly. Based on the collective feedback, organisation can decide to bring about new changes.
