Increasing the Engagement of Your Software Developers

Written by: Garik Tate and Julius Fuerzas

Building a world-class software company is hard work (it’s also insanely fun if you’re into that sort of thing), and it’s about 10x as difficult if your team is not at peak motivation to do their best. Said differently, every hour you spend building the RIGHT team and putting them into the RIGHT culture will save you 10 (or even 100) hours down the road.

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Building such a team boils down to a few principles. I’m going to share these principles with you and also share how we apply them. You might want to apply them differently, but the principles are always the same.

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Before we get started, you should know that we call ourselves ninjas… not for any particular reason. We just think it’s kind of funny. And in our opinion, it’s a lot easier to build amazing software if you’re having a lot of fun.

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Get the hiring right:

Hiring the RIGHT people is the biggest lever you have to build the right team and culture. Everything else is secondary. We believe that hiring shouldn’t be something that is purely done by managers and HR; it should be a group decision made by the people who will actually work with them day after day.

So our interview process has 2 stages. The first stage is done by the managers who qualify the applicant and do a deep dive with a 1-on-1 interview. Then if the applicant makes it past that interview, they are interviewed by the rest of the team they will be joining. We gather all the relevant ninjas in one room to meet the prospect ninja and allow everyone to ask any question they want. Then after the interview, everyone will get to vote to hire the aspiring developer or not.?

This has multiple benefits.

• The whole team feels like they can influence who their co-workers will be, which gives them a greater feeling of belonging.
• Everyone is already introduced to the new ninja since they’ve gone through the interview process together. This helps sprout healthy relationships very early on.
• The team is forced to think from a strategic level when considering new applicants. This helps give them a birds-eye view of the company.

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You can read more about our interview process here.

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Give autonomy:

We, ninjas, have a personal monopoly on our own time. We only report to the office thrice a week, and it’s only for 4 hours on those days. Within those 4 hours, we have meetings, we stay in sync, we work together, we give feedback, and we conduct training.

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Beyond those 4 hours, we have a personal monopoly on how, when, and where we do our tasks. It's totally up to us how we set our priorities, as long as we are able to deliver on time. Through this, we are able to have a steady work-life balance which allows us to enjoy a good sleep, do our daily routines, and exercise.

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Create opportunities for self-development:

We, as a tribe, want to get better every day. We know that learning is a continuous process that doesn’t just end when you get your Computer Science degree. So, we created a list of recommended books. These are books that reinforce our company values. They are books on:

• Self-development
• Productivity
• Leadership
• Business
• How to take over the world

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We then created a shared company library with all these books, both online and offline with physical copies. Now the training materials are accessible to everyone anytime they want.

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On top of that, we keep track of which books every ninja has read, and show it publicly on a massive scoreboard. This gamifies the process and even fosters a little bit of competition between ninjas (we are a competitive bunch) to see how fast we can study.

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Play together:

We have a Company Day whenever we can. We might all watch a Marvel movie, go to the beach, or travel within or outside the country. Sometimes we just all chill in the office and play board games (we especially like playing CashFlow, which helps train people how to manage their finances).

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Celebrate together:

We acknowledge every ninja's efforts and celebrate “wins” whenever we can. That includes things like someone’s first closed software deal, first yoga session, and even first time cooking a Japanese dish (lots of “firsts”). We make sure that everyone feels that growth matters to the tribe, no matter how small it is. As individual ninjas, we set our personal goals and post it for everyone to see on a public board. Whenever we achieve one of the goals we set, we post a picture to celebrate it as a tribe. We are driven by our passion to achieve all that we want and all that we need, and we keep that passion burning.

Take care of each other:

Simon Sinek put it nicely when he said that no CEO in the world takes care of the customer.? CEOs should be taking care of the people who take care of the people who take care of the customer.? One way we do this is to prioritize regularly scheduled (monthly if possible) one-on-one meetings outside the office to go deep and understand where that person is in his or her life, help them think through decisions, emotional challenges, relationship difficulties, etc. Knowing how they feel about their work too… but talking about productivity and the usual KPI’s kind of talk… is not allowed when taking care of someone on your team. We all want to feel cared-for.? If you can do this well… it will amplify all your other culture-related efforts 10x!??

Closing thoughts:?

At the end of the day, the quality of the company culture is created by two things.

1. The daily intention and commitment of the leaders in the organization to build an awesome workplace that people love and feel loved.
2. The processes and systems we put into place to foster and enforce the culture.

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And you can’t rely totally on only one or the other. Processes can automate and foster company culture, but they can never totally replace the human connection and heartfelt sincerity of the leaders in the organization (rules should never be set in stone).

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It’s a lot of work creating a great culture for a software company (developers are a weird bunch). But like I said at the beginning of this article, every hour you spend building the RIGHT team and putting them into the RIGHT culture will save you 10 (or even 100) hours down the road.

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So, how do YOU build an awesome company culture?