How to create a self-sustaining engineering culture
Engineering culture is more than foosball tables, breakout rooms, or even expensive goodies. It’s a culture where members can sustain themselves, leverage organizational tools and resources, gain recognition for their efforts, and thrive in a happy work environment. As companies grow, it becomes imperative for their engineering teams to build and nurture a culture that can sustain itself without outside intervention and act as a foundational element of a peaceful product ecosystem.
As with every system that thrives on growth, empowerment, and a sense of community, the engineering culture in a company must evolve continuously, ensure that a happy and healthy work environment is in place and that everyone across pillars is in sync with one another. After all, a product that delights customers and employees can only be created in an environment that fosters empowerment through innovation.
Creating and sustaining such a culture might seem a daunting task for companies starting out, but not one that’s entirely impossible. In this blog, I have outlined some ways for teams to nurture a self-sustaining engineering culture.
Practice being transparent
Transparent decision-making and knowledge sharing play a pivotal role in any healthy engineering culture. Innovation can thrive in a culture that welcomes an open exchange of knowledge and ideas.
Freshworks has an internal ‘Architect’s Forum’ where our experts share their knowledge. Apart from that, our leaders working on individual products within the Freshworks umbrella also power independent ‘Tech Talk’ sessions that enable sharing of domain knowledge. We also have a dedicated slack channel to discuss trending technologies and topics. This is accessible to every employee within the organization. Access to the right resources at the right time helps everyone speak up and voice their opinion or discuss the technology adoption in Freshworks.
Some of our Architect’s Forum topics include:
- ‘How Hackers exploit applications’ by our Infosec team: Learning how hackers exploit vulnerabilities in the applications that we engineer is not just interesting but educational. Engineers can learn how to avoid baking in those vulnerabilities in the first place.
- ‘Kafka: The heart of distributed applications’ by our in-house Kafka expert leading a microservice that connects all Freshworks products. Messaging systems like Kafka are at the heart of modern distributed systems. It is crucial to understand how Kafka works to design systems that elegantly scale well.
- ‘The Evolution of Web Interfaces, Iconography’ by one of our founders: Icons are all around us. Floppy disks are long gone, but the icon remains (As a save icon). This session illustrates how icons evolved over time.
- ‘Hardware Hacking’: Our Vice President, Engineering, shows developers some IoT devices and how to manipulate them. He also shares where we can get these devices and start with our own projects.
- ‘Designing an Enterprise-class Testing Architecture’: Delivered by one of our quality assurance architects, this session explains the need for engineering teams to reflect the organization’s move toward enterprise-grade products. It also covers how we can scale the testing process to meet the challenges of creating and maintaining enterprise applications.
Cultivate a culture of continuous learning
Learning is paramount to any self-sustained engineering team’s evolution. Provide enough opportunities for learning across the teams to catch up with the never-ending technological changes. Here, even an overdose does no harm.
Willingness to learn is a choice. Anyone who keeps learning stays young in my opinion. At Freshworks learning is our prime focus. We believe in learning on the job.
Freshworks encourages our employees to constantly upskill their competencies and leverage their potential by providing a learning program. We have an internal portal called ‘Odyssey’ that enables every engineer to quench their thirst for learning. One can apply for conferences across the globe and apply for certification courses. We also offer complete reimbursement of subscriptions to external learning platforms like Udemy, Simplilearn, and Pluralsight.
We also have multiple programs, such as ‘Learning from home’ initiatives and the ‘Tech Talk’ series, to ensure our employees are well-versed in engineering trends. I have outlined a few more below:
- ‘Unwind – Virtual Happy Hour’ is an exciting program that helps everyone showcase their passions outside work.
- ‘Learning from home’ covers a host of topics in a simple-to-follow format of ‘W-W-H,’ which is Why What, and how we did. As part of this series, employees can learn about varied topics, such as ‘How to effectively write unit test cases’ to advanced topics like ‘Developing Micro Frontends using Single-SPA.’
- ‘A peek into Astrophotography’: Organized by a fantastic photographer, he explained his passion for stargazing and celestial events in outer space. He also offered tips about equipment.
- ‘Personal Finance and Financial Independence’: What to risk, when to risk and how to gain financial independence; this has been the core topic for discussion this hour. Also, thoughts around organizing your investments were a cherry on top.
- ‘My Entrepreneurship Journey’: Delivered by one of our colleagues who shared his entrepreneurship journey, learning about the pitfalls and understanding the journey of starting a business was a valuable lesson.
- ‘Craftsmanship with Amigurumi’: This session taught employees focus and patience, which had to do with Japanese art. Excelling this art is one way to achieve those.
- ‘Journey toward wealth creation – an introduction to stock markets’: The stock market is challenging to understand. But not for everyone. One of our colleagues gave us the mantra to understand the stock market and how we can consistently create wealth.
Let the execution speak
Ideas always help you to set the direction of your goal. But, execution builds trust across your customers and improves confidence within the team to achieve more. Always plan your execution to meet the market needs and be on the ball. Ensure the deliverability on time to let your execution speak for itself.
At Freshworks we follow efficient release planning to ensure a smooth transition of feature set to customers with timely communication and on-time deliverables.
Ensure accountability and effective communication
Accountability is key to any individual accomplishment. Being proud of any achievement is entirely different from being accountable for it. When you achieve something, you reach the goal. But, when you are accountable for something, you embrace the journey toward the goal. Success, after all, is not a destination but a journey. What you learn during the journey will pave the path to great heights.
At Freshworks every engineer is accountable for the assigned task. Be it a bug or a feature for a developer or identifying a bug by a quality assurance engineer, the journey is not from assignment to deployment. It’s from understanding the requirement to continuous observability after deployment to enhance the performance.
All the ideas and execution plans can go for a toss if they’re not efficiently communicated. Different roles communicate differently. A product person understands the customer pain point, a designer relates it to the user experience, an architect views the problem from a schema and extensibility point of view, a developer concentrates on the implementation part, and finally, the quality assurance engineer will wear the shoes of a customer but with their perspective.
Any loose end in this chain will miss the customer’s actual needs. So, it is imperative to focus on the bigger picture and stay in sync during all phases of execution stated above.
At Freshworks the roadmap planning is so strong that the bigger picture is clearly set during the Idea to Product (I2P) phase. This is being cascaded during all the phases and definite feasibility checks are done during architecture review. The entire team wears the hat of the customer during the next phase to provide necessary bottom-to-top feedback. Once agreed upon by the team, the execution plan kicks in and the estimates are cascaded to customers from the team via efficient release planning.
Empower employees with rewards and recognition
Rewards and recognition are the cherries on the top when all the above are met. Timely recognition and a fair reward system will boost the morale and productivity of the individual.
Freshworks rewards its engineers on a regular basis. There are spot recognitions for individuals, culture-based awards for the teams, rewards for the technical achievements by comparing across products. Managers and leaders also encourage appreciation via culture cards whenever an employee delivers a moment of wow during their daily tasks. All these awards are given apart from the regular career achievement reviews at Freshworks, which includes moving up the career ladder with promotions and revisions in compensation.
Our Rewards and recognition are not mere monetary benefits. They are shaped in such a way that they benefit individuals’ growth. Spot awards like the ‘First Ball Six’ award encourage employees to get themselves adapted to the system and contribute quickly. ‘200 Not out’ is given to an exceptional individual performer who has shown craftsmanship in their work. We have rewards for Open source contributions and conference presentations, which helps employees evolve to the next level.
Conclusion
Rewards and recognition can only help organizations that focus on elevating their employee experience by empowering the people who power businesses. At Freshworks, our work culture is something that takes priority over individual differences. “Culture forms the bedrock of everything we do at Freshworks,” says Suman Gopalan, CHRO at Freshworks.
Finally, I would like to conclude with our Freshworks Thalaivar, G’s most exciting quote on culture.
Building a company is similar to building a product. Culture is the UX for employees and Support is the UX for customers.
– Girish Mathrubootham, CEO Freshworks
In a company, if you preserve culture, you are preserving your employees, and your engineering teams are no different.
