With hybrid or fully remote work environments remaining the norm at many tech companies in the new year, a fun, supportive community and people-first culture are becoming increasingly important for organizations hoping to attract and retain top talent.
There’s no doubt that remote work brings the benefit of flexibility, but it also creates significant barriers to fostering companywide connectedness and employee belonging.
According to an August 2022 Harvard Business Review article, 37 percent of respondents in a Conference for Women survey said their sense of community at work has declined since its state before the Covid-19 pandemic. Similarly, a June 2022 Gallup poll found that 32 percent of employees felt less connected to their organization’s culture after their companies adopted hybrid models.
The importance of community has never been higher. In the Conference for Women survey, people who reported feeling a sense of community at work were 55 percent more engaged in their jobs and 66 percent more likely to stay with their company. Cultivating camaraderie in the workplace has proven benefits and plays a role in holding onto expert employees.
The three Austin-based companies featured below know the importance of promoting togetherness in hybrid spaces, and they are dreaming up unique ways to ensure that individuals feel valued and challenged.
SailPoint utilizes AI and machine learning to provide businesses with identity security solutions.
What are the key characteristics of a good team culture, and what are some ways that your team brings those to life?
Our global talent acquisition team embraces our organization’s core values, which are the “Four ‘I’s”: innovation, integrity, impact and individuals.
For innovation and impact, our talent acquisition leaders actively seek ideas and feedback from team members. For example, they have gathered ideas for how to improve our enablement programs. We all have had the opportunity to make an impact and rewrite the enablement program at SailPoint.
With integrity, our team strives to keep its promises to each other, our business partners and the community. We are operating with as much transparency as possible. We always do the right thing, even if it sometimes means having tough conversations.
In regard to individuals, like most companies, SailPoint has a strong remote presence, and our talent acquisition team is no exception. We’ve developed a forum where individuals can express their feelings, thoughts and ideas across the organization in real time. We support one another in an authentic and empowering way. Being able to be your authentic self with the team and leadership has made our team stronger. We use our bimonthly meetings to collaborate with the entire global team.
How do you ensure that your team members continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
There are a few key areas that we focus on to keep our crew members challenged and engaged. One area is cross training. We just completed a 60-day training program for our global recruiting team. Every talent acquisition crew member had input in designing the program, which made a big impact. Our team appreciates it because it presents a constant opportunity to grow and develop.
Communication is a critical aspect to any successful team. Our talent acquisition team shares important updates on the organization, new hiring markets, creation of new departments, movement within or outside of the team, challenges — you name it.
We consistently ask for feedback to make continual improvement. We also take the time to celebrate — sharing individual, team and company wins. We fully engage with our talent acquisition crew members and recognize their cultures as we navigate a global and virtual work life.
We take the time to celebrate. … Celebrations help people bring their full selves to work in an authentic way.”
Do you have any unique team traditions to celebrate successes?
We love to celebrate wins, birthdays, new hires, work anniversaries and other key milestones.
On our talent acquisition team, we recognize team members when they complete a challenging project. At our recent global onsite, appropriately named “TA-Palooza,” we celebrated our 2022 hiring success by hosting a BBQ happy hour. One of our local crew members prepared the food, and several members of the executive team joined us in applauding the year’s accomplishments.
At SailPoint, no contribution goes unnoticed. Celebrations also help people bring their full selves to work in an authentic way. We bring an emotional culture to life by taking the time to commemorate successes and milestones.
Favor hosts an on-demand mobile delivery app for everything from office lunches to household groceries.
What are the key characteristics of a good team culture, and what are some ways that your team brings those to life?
Whenever people ask me what I love the most about Favor, the first things that I mention are ownership and autonomy. My leader trusts me to do the job that I was hired to do, and I believe this kind of trust trickles down from the executive team to the entire company and positively influences our company culture.
It has influenced the way that I lead my team. I trust the managers on my team to make solid decisions and to empower their individual contributors to do the same. This amount of trust in team members at all levels leads to more creativity, ownership of the whole software development life cycle and higher engagement across the engineering organization.
Another sign of a good team culture is prioritizing feedback. I share team-specific feedback during retros and team member-specific feedback during weekly one on ones and bi-annual performance reviews. Prioritizing intentional and constructive feedback increases productivity, reinforces team alignment and strengthens relationships.
Prioritizing intentional and constructive feedback increases productivity, reinforces team alignment and strengthens relationships.”
How do you ensure that your team members continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
As a leader, one of the easiest ways to keep your team engaged is to understand what motivates each person individually. Oftentimes, this is simply a matter of asking each team member: When was the last time you worked on something that excited you? The answer to this question helps me identify work that would be well-suited for each person on my team as they continue to thrive and grow at Favor.
Another effective way to keep team members engaged and excited is to help them understand the “why” behind their work. It is important to me that everyone on my team understands the problem we are trying to solve, the intended user experience and the key performance indicators we are trying to achieve.
I find this understanding accomplishes two things: it helps remove ambiguity and encourages engagement because we understand how impactful our work is. There is no better feeling than, at the end of a big release, looking at metrics or positive user sentiments that are related to a feature that you worked on and being able to say, “I did that!”
Do you have any unique team traditions to celebrate successes?
I have been at Favor for a little more than three years and have worked with a few different teams along the way. Prior to the pandemic, when in-person work was the norm for Favor, I participated in a wide array of team celebrations, including the legendary paper plate awards, axe throwing and even monster truck rallies, to name a few events.
Our present hybrid work environment requires that we be more creative and inclusive when planning team celebrations, as our team members work both in person at our Austin office and in varying remote work environments.
My team has found success with hybrid events and recently enjoyed playing Codenames together over a video call. This might seem simple, but it brought the entire team together in an inclusive way, despite our different work locations, to enjoy a little friendly competition and get to know each other better. We had a lot of fun!
Fintech company Acrisure Innovation builds AI-driven software for the insurance industry.
What are the key characteristics of a good team culture, and what are some ways that your team brings those to life?
We value having a collaborative and friendly culture. We have team happy hours and eat lunch together when everyone is in the office. We’ve even watched a couple World Cup matches together.
The managers here have also been very supportive and care about our career development. They’ve been easy to talk to and supportive of our ideas. We care about making sure to listen to everyone’s ideas, regardless of seniority, and have a very flat hierarchy.
I feel like I’ve made several friends at this company, and we make an effort to hire similarly supportive and collaborative people.
I’ve made several friends at this company, and we make an effort to hire similarly supportive and collaborative people.”
How do you ensure that your team members continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
We have “20 percent time” every week where everyone can spend a few hours working on something they’re interested in outside of their current projects. People have taken this time to study things they’re interested in and do things they don’t normally get to do at work.
We also try to give everyone some degree of freedom when doing their normal work projects. Everyone is encouraged to take ownership of their work and is given the independence to research and explore as they see fit. There is no fear of failure; if some research doesn’t pan out, as long as we’ve learned something, then it was worthwhile.
Do you have any unique team traditions to celebrate successes?
Everyone here has been very liberal with giving kudos for successes at the company. We have a “high5” channel in Slack so everyone can see when a project was successfully completed and who worked on it. We also have a kudos section in every monthly all-hands meeting, during which anyone can speak up and shout out the work that people have done that month. We often run over time in that part.
We have lunches and happy hours with new hires, and we generally have opportunities for everyone to hang out. There is even an in-office coloring station, and finished coloring pages are put on the refrigerator.
