Culture @ Smart

At Smart we often speak about our culture. It’s something we’ve cultivated from the inception of the business and value as much today as we did then, eight years ago. There’s never been a culture button to switch on in the morning – instead, it’s something that we knew to do organically when Smart was formed. It was easy then as we were a small team and knew everyone's birthdays or beer preferences, all of which help to make collaboration easier. However, as we have scaled to become a business with more than 800 people, we’ve had to put in a tremendous amount of work to support and maintain our culture, which we knew to be so precious.?

The objective has always been to make Smart a ‘great place to work’. By putting all this effort in, over many years and often behind the scenes, the culture becomes more like muscle memory, a natural reflex that we engage when working with our teammates or when solving problems. In many ways, that inert ability for people to leverage it in certain situations is its biggest strength. Equally, though, it’s not a tangible thing that we can point to in a given moment and say that was a point of inflection for us.?

Over the years some of the many specific activities we’ve carried out to shape and define and protect Smart’s culture have been formal elements, like designing a very specific hiring and onboarding process (both within Engineering and across the whole company) and setting up internal communications so that people feel treated equally across the business. At the same time, we work with organisations like Great Place to Work, to ensure we understand how Smart is performing in the hearts and minds of all of our colleagues, and have put in place great policies around maternity, paternity and many other aspects of life. Collectively, these initiatives are part of our framework for employee wellbeing and this in turn helps to provide a positive working environment.

Underlying all of this, we codified our beliefs and mission statements into a set of simple objectives known as ‘The Smart Principles ’, to guide how we should all work together (I’d recommend a read if you haven’t seen them before).

That guidance from leadership is vital at pointing you in the right direction – it helps you navigate situations and choose a path more autonomously. Equally, though, it doesn’t describe the human reaction to those values as each person will interpret them in their own way. That unique and very human quality is how the essence of our culture is shaped.

I’ve always maintained that it’s hard for one person to write down what culture means as it can mean different things to different people. With that in mind, I sent around a survey to ask people to write down the three most important things about our culture and this article is a summary of that feedback. To give you a sense of the themes in the responses, I have generated a word cloud based on popular phrases.

We may not be able to touch it, but we know it exists as there are constant reminders all around us. Clients remark upon it when they visit us. It frames how we interview or promote people and it defines our ways of working. It is particularly visible when we celebrate an achievement or when a group comes together over a weekend to resolve a problem.?

You could say that it is a start-up culture that we have managed to retain as we have scaled. But I believe it is much more than having a pool table and beer fridge (despite having those things!). Whilst that social framework is very much part of our daily lives, we come to work for so much more. It is so important to be motivated by your work and those around you. Knowing that your day is going to be spent doing something you enjoy and surrounded by people whom you trust and who will support you when needed is vital in you being successful.

That trust is earned through experience, by being rewarded in those times when we succeed and being supported when we need guidance. Each of these moments is a building block that creates the foundations of something you cannot buy, a feeling of value. The self-belief that you can solve the next challenge because you have witnessed it being done in the past is infectious, and something that ultimately you share with those around you.

If you are in a leadership position you will know you have many people looking up to you. Your actions, the way you communicate and how you collaborate with your team are vital in shaping how they behave and execute when you are not around. Your ability to garner their trust is key in ensuring your collective objectives are met. In basic terms that can come down to picking a carrot or stick approach. Neither seems apt for this discussion, though, as I believe we have strived for something more organic. By fostering a feeling of self-worth, teams feel a greater sense of empowerment which in turn helps them deliver to the best of their abilities. It’s also important that they know that they work in a safe environment, one where they can ask questions when they don’t understand something or make a suggestion without fear of ridicule. Perhaps most importantly, they must know that they won’t be blamed if they do something wrong.

If you consider your academic past, there were teachers who inspired you and, equally, there were teachers who made you dread going to their classes. Being motivated to go to a teacher's class would help you enjoy that lesson and ultimately achieve a better grade for that subject. That positive reinforcement from your teacher had an impact on not only you but also those around you, meaning your classmates benefited and collectively you would all work more cohesively to achieve a better outcome for the same goal.?

The net result is everyone wins – you get that good grade and the teacher and even the school get a boost as their numbers are higher. This behavior seems so obvious when reading it like this, but it is so easy to forget in the moment. Deep down, we know it is important, but sometimes there isn’t time to focus on it.

Why we work determines how well we work.

A practical example of this within engineering is test coverage, the automated tests that check the quality of the code that is being written. Tests are considered a best practice in engineering, but writing them adds time and because time is money, tests are sometimes skipped. At Smart we have always written tests alongside our code, so much so that we have almost 100% test coverage. In doing so we not only ensure that the code is going to work in production when it is deployed, but also provide a sense of confidence for the teams working on that code. They can write a new feature, run the test suite locally and validate if their new code will work or not in production. That ability to test and learn in a safe environment is a great way of gaining trust and self confidence. It is also an agility that provides a platform for an old adage; fail fast, learn fast. This is a circle of trust, where we create the code and tests which empowers a best practice that becomes a force of habit, and that in turn is something that is repeated, thus protecting the code and the way we work together. That trust in your work and those around you is a vital building block of our culture.

What is less visible is having a leadership team that provides the time and space to ensure we do write test coverage alongside our code. A start up can be excused for cutting corners in pursuit of the MVP, but we never did that. That executive-level belief in doing things correctly from the outset (one of our principles) had a material impact on our engineering culture from the outset and is still part of the heartbeat of Smart today.

Ultimately, being happy and motivated at work is such an important factor in our productivity and general well being. The Harvard Business Review recently did a study to understand how culture at work shapes employee motivation. They interviewed 20,000 employees from 50 major companies around the world and came to the conclusion that why we work determines how well we work.

That single phrase says so much and is very aligned with not only the sentiment found in the feedback from the survey but also the experiences felt and witnessed these past eight years at Smart. Simply put, we get out of bed to go to work because we believe in what we are doing and will achieve that day. We know that our work benefits others whilst also improving our personal skills, and that we will be surrounded by people we trust and who will support us as needed. Our colleagues are also our friends and our place of work is a safe and enjoyable one.?

I’ll leave you with the output of another study into culture that really resonated with me.

Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a tool for people to complete manual tasks online, researchers wanted to understand how people performed when they understood the value of their work. A group of almost 2,500 workers were told they would be analysing medical images to look for objects of interest and would be paid per image they assessed. They were divided into two cohorts. The first cohort were told that once completed, their work would be discarded, while the second cohort was told that the objects they were assessing were cancerous tumor cells. The latter group spent more time analysing the images, which resulted in them earning less money than the ‘discard’ group, but importantly the quality of their work was far higher.

Ultimately we all care about what we do, and when given the right environment to work in we will feel empowered to produce better quality work – and that in turn helps us all flourish.