Promoting a Sharing Culture for a Software Team
Envy owes its longevity to community contributions, whether it’s a blog post, technique, design, or a platform for teaching the technologies we use each day. 2015 and 2016 weren’t so hot when it came to sharing, though. Only a few folks were taking us up on supplying these sorts of materials — less than an article per month, and a dwindling amount of work on the usual suspects like Dribbble and CodePen.
Reasons varied. Our staff is paid hourly, and our billing is hourly — everyone’s natural inclination is to ensure as many logged hours as possible are billed to a client. We’ve never been without a side project to invest spare time into. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of assuming a chosen topic isn’t unique or worth sharing (including me, on this post).
Issues weren’t limited to the outbound side of things. Our internal project groups had become increasingly silo’d and weren’t always familiar with other teams’ progress. People were passionate about their work, but often lacked a platform to talk about it.
I started the year out with a survey and a simple premise: if time and topic were squared away, would you be interested in writing, presenting, or sharing something? Yes across the board.
Why Share?
It’s easy to say “share whenever possible,” but why should we continue to hold it as a core company value? What justification should we lean for the internal call to arms?
- As designers and developers, it’s the least we can do for a community consistently relied on for education and open source materials.
- It helps showcase internal processes and abilities beyond those communicated in case studies.
- As technologies shift, it provides a platform for internal change. I heard React was good, and also here’s a post about it.
- Shared materials act as a log of problems we’ve tackled and solved, both for our reference and that of potential clients.
- Occasionally, searching for an answer to a problem leads us to our own posts. Nice work, past me.
Our Approach
With our problems tallied up and attributed to scheduling woes, a general culture of avoiding internal billing, and difficulty finding topics, we’ve introduced a few new procedures.
Curation
Rather than waiting on folks to identify topics on their own, I’m helping curate posts on a more frequent schedule. To assist in subject matter discovery, there’s also an easy-to-access place for anyone to add posts they’d like to see from their coworkers.
The Internet is a big place, and not every topic needs to be unique. A large part of this curation is reinforcement that new perspectives on trails are useful — I’ve certainly needed multiple articles with a similar premise in the past to grasp a technology.
Internal Work is Client Work
We’re treating Envy as a client with budgeted hours to achieve the goals up under Why Share?. This helps offset the usual dissonance in billing internally, brings everything into a process we’re familiar with, and begets better analysis of progress towards these goals.
Schedules and Deadlines
In addition to curated topics, authors are selected with relative schedules and workload in mind. It’s inherent in a consultancy that workloads will fluctuate week-to-week.
The three most important details for staying on track: deadlines, deadlines, and deadlines. It’s second nature to drop internal work (even if it’s treated as a client project) without accountability.
Start a Meetup
Local community plays a huge role in company development, and we’ve refocused on running meetups (Front-End Orlando). Additionally, nudges have been given toward speaking and making sure everyone’s taking advantage of their out-of-state conference trip (we’d love to meet up at EmberConf this month!).
Show ’n’ Tell
To help break up the siloing, we have two (old) initiatives (that we’re holding ourselves to this time around): regular company-wide show ’n’ tell sessions, and cross-project pairing. From a curation standpoint, these activities are perfect for rapidly generating future ideas.
On the Docket
Someday we’ll sort out a means of regular social media contribution. Maybe. We’re also working on freeing up more development time for open source contributions. Not in the toss another JS library onto the heap sense, but providing company time to promote core contributor aspirations.
Short-Term Gains
It’s way too early to see much in the way of correlation, but our efforts thus far have been promising:
- Teachers and students at area universities have been inviting us to speak, give portfolio reviews, and mentor
- Recent articles have obtained far greater reach than we’ve been accustomed to, partially attributed to a Medium migration
- Community involvement has helped refresh Envy’s standing (and existence) in a post-Code School world
Does your company have similar issues that you’re working through or solved in the past? We’d love to hear what you found useful and which paths were dead ends.
