Intro

A manager must create a team and corporate culture.

Studies

• “When we look at companies’ web pages, we find that 85% of the S&P 500 companies have a section (sometimes even two) dedicated to -- what they call – “corporate culture”, i.e. principles and values that should inform the behavior of all firms’ employees. The value we find more commonly advertised is innovation (mentioned by 80% of them), followed by integrity and respect (70%)” from “The Value of Corporate Culture” by Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, September 2013

• Ninety-five percent of job candidates believe culture is more important than compensation, according to Johns Hopkins University fellow Lizz Pellet. Book: The Cultural Fit Factor

• Less than one-third (31.5%) of U.S. workers were engaged in their jobs in 2014. Gallup Poll “Majority of U.S. Employees Not Engaged Despite Gains in 2014”

  •  Fewer than one in three workers are committed to the success of their organization and over half say they are disengaged and do nothing more than the minimum to keep their job. 

• Google Project Artistotle ( "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts"): “What makes a team effective at Google?” The researchers found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together. In order of importance:

  • Psychological safety: Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk

  • Dependability: On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time (vs the opposite - shirking responsibilities).

  • Structure and clarity: An individual’s understanding of job expectations, the process for fulfilling these expectations, and the consequences of one’s performance are important for team effectiveness.

  • Meaning: Finding a sense of purpose in either the work itself or the output is important for team effectiveness.

  • Impact: The results of one’s work, the subjective judgement that your work is making a difference, is important for teams.

• Google Project: “What makes a manager great at Google”

Open

• Jaluch has some good blogs and stats on the different types of bias: https://www.jaluch.co.uk/blog/

Open

Source: https://www.jaluch.co.uk/unconscious-bias-infographic/

• Project Implicit (from Harvard U) provides tests to see if you are implicitly biased:

  •  find out your implicit associations about race, gender, sexual orientation, and other topics!

Articles

Forbes: Culture: Why It's The Hottest Topic In Business Today by Josh Bersin

Other Companies' Culture Statements

• Netflix’s Culture: Freedom and Responsbility. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture and slide deck: https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

Customer-Developer Interaction

Developers need to be in-sync with customers' problems and the solutions they seek.

• Have teams spend some time every month working in customer service or with business development

• Set regular meetings with sales and customer service.

• Developer-run focus groups.

• Encourage developers to answer forums.

Innovation Culture

Create a culture of innovation, codify it into the employee manuals, have weekly ideation meetings with different team leads, have incentives for hackathons.

Some Good Ideas

• Spend 20% of the employees time on any project of their choosing.

• Hackathons (possibly bonus with profit sharing from their ideas)

• Free online learning resources.