We're discussing how to assess the culture when you're just joining a new team. Edgar's advice is to ask all the stupid questions in the first few months.
Find deeper questions as you get to know the people, and what their roles are. Get a sense of how people think about their teams. Do they use a specific language that excludes the partners like product or DevOps, creating them vs us mentality? Do people understand what they're working on and if there is a culture of accountability.
There is some good advice in the book "The first 90 days" book:
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of our strategy?
- What are the biggest challenges and opportunities we have on the team?
- What resources can we leverage more effectively?
- How can we improve the process?
- What should be my priority as a manager?
Some indicators Edgar uses to think about culture:
- Have goals, and not just worry about promotions as their goal. Teams are driven by making a bigger impact have healthier cultures than those who only work on projects that will get them promoted. You still want to know what the expectations are and work on your career growth, but it shouldn't be the culture of checking the boxes and avoiding everything else.
- Individuals should be open to a positive change and have aspirations.
- Know the expectations from the team, the manager, and the organization.
To keep your culture healthy while working remotely in the COVID times, Edgar recommends using video calls to your advantage. Schedule time to be silly since we don't have the luxury of bumping into each other for a casual chat and ideate on the whiteboard. For example, Google Earth trips to museums around the world or pair programming.
As a manager, you want to be vulnerable and admit you're making plenty of mistakes to let your team know it's ok to not know everything. And being remote made it easier for people to reach out for help 1:1. One person may be better at solving specific problems just because they've faced similar problems before. Think of it as components or puzzles of problems that you solve over time and it makes it easier to solve similar problems in the future.
Also, don't forget to schedule a time to discuss the problem statement before people start solving it. It's important for everyone to understand the bigger picture. This creates another problem, meeting overload. And we all have a meeting/zoom fatigue.
Some other ideas we discussed were
- Having running zoom call with no agenda.
- Having lunch together over zoom.
- Do 2-minute team call to wish a happy birthday.
- Ship some fun t-shirts to people.
- Organize the team's internal hackathons.
- Gift lootcrate boxes for birthdays
- Create virtual birthday cards.
Invest in the documentation. You can't just lean over and ask for stuff. It's also should be easy to find. So discoverability is important too.
Resources we mentioned in our conversation:
The first 90 days
Google Earth trips to museums around the world
Lootscate subscription boxes
Tribute
LinkedIn Kudos
Kudos.com
Github's recommendation on ADR
Camp Yampire
