Get best of the week

Culture as the basis for scaling the x2 team every year. About hiring mistakes and culture fit

I work as a development manager at Miro and am actively involved in hiring. Over the past few years, our team has doubled annually and has become multicultural; we have opened offices in America and Europe.

5 years ago, at the beginning of the stage of rapid growth, our hiring and onboarding processes were not ready for this, which led to errors in hiring and leaving a third of employees. In addition to strong demotivation, this threatened with the loss of our internal culture and did not allow us to grow further. It was necessary to radically change the situation.

I’ll tell you how researching the experience of successful technology companies helped us focus on managing corporate culture, cope with hiring mistakes and build the process so that today the team grows x2 annually and the turnover rate does not rise above 5%.

This article is a revised version.my performance at Saint TeamLead Conf . At the end of the article is a list of useful sources on the topic of working with corporate culture in technology companies.


Hiring Issues During Rapid Growth


Bottleneck in hire. From the first years of the company's existence, the final interviews with all the candidates were conducted by our CEO, who is also the co-founder of the company. Behind him was the last word: he understood best of all what the company should be in the future and which team was needed for this. When the number of final interviews grew to 3-5 per week, the CEO stopped having time to conduct them, and this began to slow down the process. He was ready to transfer this task to the Timlids, but for this we needed general principles for making decisions that were not formulated at that time.

Ineffective team interviews.Since the founding of the company, it was decided to conduct a team interview. It was important for us that the whole team in which the person will work had the opportunity to know him in advance and decide whether she wants to work with him. For the candidate, the opportunity to get to know the whole team in advance was also useful. In the first years of the company's existence, from 3 to 5 people gathered at such interviews and there were no problems. Over time, team interviews began to gather up to 15 people. And the process rained down.

Many participants did not understand their purpose and role in team interviews, but came because “it is customary”. Timlids and HR did not teach people how to conduct interviews and did not explain how and what questions to ask, what is important to learn, how to evaluate. This reduced involvement: people believed that they were wasting their time, kept silent at interviews and, as a result, did not understand how to make a decision on the candidate.

The lack of a formalized description of the process and the general context led to the fact that, as a result of the interview, people could not agree and left the final decision to the CEO, who at that time could be on a business trip, without the ability to quickly respond. All this caused confusion and stress for the team and the candidate.

Different grades in cross-cultural interviews.The problems of team interviews were compounded when we opened foreign offices and colleagues from Russia, Europe and America began to take part in the interviews. Differences in national cultures made decision-making and opportunities for employment more difficult. For example, in America it is quite natural to change jobs every 2 years, in Russia we often work in one place for a long time, and we can regard the frequent job changes negatively. And this is just one small example, of which there were a huge number in reality.

To solve these difficulties, we formalized the recruitment process, describing each stage in detail, and conducted interview workshops. But all this did not help to solve the main difficulty - the lack of a common understanding of how we make a decision on hiring and why it is so.

Culture in technology companies


If there is a problem, find out how others solved it. Based on this principle, we conducted a study on how small technology startups, fast-growing companies, and “market monsters” solve such problems.



The results of the study showed that they all paid great attention to internal culture, and many of the basic processes — hiring and developing people, product development — were built on its basis. It was not enough to do only a cool product, it was necessary to build a culture and manage it.
“Every company builds two things: the products they sell, and the culture inside the company.”

“Like any random experiment, the results of letting culture form unchecked can vary between fair to disastrous.” Slack

The first step for this was to describe the current culture, so that the team had a starting point and space for work:
“Codifying those beliefs into a handbook makes them tangible and, most importantly, editable. Making the company our best product is a guiding principle, but we can't easily improve what we haven't articulated. ” Basecamp

The described culture, its DNA is then turned into an Employee Handbook or Culture code: just a text document like Basecamp or a full-fledged book with illustrations like Valve . They are based on the values ​​of the company, the way the company understands culture, mission, guidelines, team rituals and accepted norms of behavior.

If you are interested in looking at more examples, I recommend a huge selection of materials from my colleague Anna Dvornikova.



What is corporate culture and why is it


What does culture mean for us?
Each company defines culture in its own way. The correct answer does not exist.



For us, culture is

  • The principles by which we make decisions;
  • The way we relate to people inside and outside the company: colleagues, candidates, users;
  • The way we work;
  • Behavior that makes us successful.

We include culture in all important processes, we get such a function of the “glue” of the company. Culture also has a control function that Andy Grove described well in High output management . When, in the face of uncertainty, everything changes rapidly and the company grows, culture is the only thing that allows you to be sure that the right decisions will be made, including in hiring. It is impossible to describe everything in the instructions, and the culture works where instructions and regulations do not work.



Mission and Vision

Culture does not exist in a vacuum; it relies on something. As a rule, this is the mission and vision, the history of the company, its goals, market trends.

Does the business care about culture? Does culture help achieve company goals? Culture alone is not a business goal, but it allows you to build a strong team that can achieve your business goals.

Tyler Palmer, VR Operations at Patreon, writes that their culture is based on team, culture and business. It is in this order, because culture is an indicator of business success:
“We believe that establishing the proper foundation with the right team and culture determines whether or not we will sustain as a business. Any business's product will and should change over time. Aligning the team on cultural values ​​will guide you through those transitions; an ill-defined or weak culture will fail you. "

PandaDoc, begin their Culture Code with the story of the founders and the reasons why they created the company.

In our work on culture, we began with a description of the mission and vision. At one of the strategic sessions, top management asked themselves questions: “What is happening in the world of collaboration? What do we have to do with this? ” We want to contribute to changing the way people around the world interact.


2018

Based on the answers, they formulated a mission and a vision , showed them to the whole team, collected feedback, conducted several iterations - and got the final result with which the company has existed for several years:
We are on a mission to empower teams to create the next big things by providing best solutions for collaboration.

To live in the world where teams can create products and services together as if they are in the same room regardless of where team members are located.

70+


Culture as a product. Analyzing the culture of technology companies, we learned about Asana 's approach - Culture as a Product (“We decided to treat culture as a product”). In fact, it represents the basic cycle of product development:



We, as a product company, are close to this approach, so we took it as a basis for working with culture. This means that we begin by researching the user experience of employees, create a minimally working version of the product, test it, refine it based on feedback, catch and correct “cultural bugs”, improve the product itself and its “delivery” to users. And we repeat this cycle as many times as necessary.

This approach focuses on the end user, gives the right to make mistakes and the possibility of improvements. It was important for us that the whole company was involved in the work on culture. At the beginning of work on the formulation of values ​​in 2018, the company employed 70+ people in Russia, Europe and America. We got everyone involved.

Collect stories. The first step we have gathered the opinion of each employee about the culture of the company. To do this, they asked everyone to answer 5 questions (collected via Google form). Questions were written openly and not in the forehead. We did not ask “What are the company's values,” but encouraged people to tell stories. The questionnaire was anonymous, but in the end we gave the opportunity to subscribe to those who wanted it (almost all subscribed).

Questions

  1. , , Miro (, « »)? ?
  2. , Miro ? ?
  3. , Miro. ?
  4. , . .
  5. « », : Miro teammate?

The answers were collected within a week, they were filled by everyone. As a result, we received not dry numbers, but many stories that revealed the culture of the company and its feeling for each employee. But all this represented several tens of pages of unstructured text.



Clustering Further, the working group analyzed each answer and put down semantic tags opposite each. It turned out 30+ tags. Then we combined them into clusters, ranged them and formed the first version of the values ​​on the basis of the most frequent ones.

Three levels of detail. Having decided on the final list of values, we added two levels to each: a short description in several sentences and observable examples of behavior.

I will show three levels on an example:

  • Value: Embrace trust to turn failures into wins
  • Description: We trust and help each other. It's ok to make mistakes and not scary to experiment because we create a safe and supportive environment.
  • Behavior Examples (True Miro team member behaves like this): Problem-solving oriented, instead of searching for someone to blame. Asks for help, openly admits mistakes. Helps others, approachable. Trusts others. Promotes an easy-going, informal, democratic atmosphere in the team.

Testing. We went to validate the resulting list: we hung out values ​​at offices and asked to write our impressions of them, conducted personal and team interviews with employees, asking the following questions:

  • Is this aspect of company life important to our long-term success?
  • Is this aspect related to all departments of the company and all employees?
  • ?
  • - ̆ ?
  • ?

All "cultural bugs" we fixed and fixed. Examples of “cultural bugs”: we say one thing and do another; the described value does not encourage actions that are important to us; it's not about us at all.

So we formulated our values ​​↓↓↓



Subsequently, internal memes and stories were added to these levels. They make the culture alive. For example, at the inner hackathon we made a sticker pack with the ANCHLAD sticker? (“But am I not making bullshit”)? On the one hand, it is about Yes to passion, no to bullshit. On the other hand, it is connected with the story of one of our teams, which held its meetings under that name weekly.

What's next? Further, we embed the described values ​​/ principles in the key processes of the company: hiring, newcomers adaptation, training and development, feedback system, career planning, internal communications and so on.

Hiring changes


I'll tell you how we changed the hiring process through culture.

Culture fit Handbook

In interviews, it is important for us to identify two key things: how much the candidate corresponds to the role (job fit) and our culture (culture fit). Everyone is approximately able to test professional skills, and it is more difficult to cope with culture fit. Therefore, we have created a guide for hiring managers and all interview participants. It contains values, examples of behavior for each, questions that can verify the candidate's compliance with each value, and recommendations for interpreting answers.

Questions are open and projective. For example, how do you know if a candidate is Yes to passion, no to bullshit? We believe that a person with this value does not create tons of instructions for everyone and does not build formal barriers in communications and processes. For this candidate, you can ask to talk about how a specific workflow was arranged in his previous team, how they managed to work on the process, who built it, and how he relates to instructions and formalized procedures.

And then you can interpret his answers:



Naturally, not everything can be determined by questions, and answers are socially desirable. But anyway, this instruction works and helps teams in interviews. In addition, it allows all interview participants to understand what is happening: when one person asks a question, everyone else understands that we are checking this question and why.

Scorecard (questionnaire-questionnaire)

After the interview, all participants fill out the questionnaire in the HR system. Aggregated questionnaire results then allow you to make a hiring decision. In addition to assessing experience and skills in the questionnaire there is a section about culture fit. The ratings in this section are also important in decision making, as are the ratings for skills.



Hiring manager and hiring decision

This is a new feature in the team, not a separate position. The hiring manager, like everyone else, is involved in product development, but at the same time understands the entire hiring process, knows the hiring priorities in the company and in each team individually. Together with the recruiter, he leads the candidate to the offer. Usually this task is performed by team leaders.

Before making an offer to the candidate, the hiring manager protects this decision before the top management. To do this, he writes a hiring decision - briefly and briefly describes why we are hiring this person and what are the risks of this decision. A separate item there is always a culture fit. To prepare this document, the manager with the recruiter analyzes all Scorecards, finds out the details if necessary (for example, when the whole team gave high marks, except for one participant).



Newbie Adaptation

During adaptation, it is important for us not only to immerse the person as quickly as possible in the processes and make him a “combat unit”, but also to check all the risks from the hiring decision.

Each newcomer has a daily task plan, a weekly list of goals, formulated in the form of “what I know by the end of this week” and “what I can do by the end of the week”, there are performance metrics by which a newcomer, his team leader and all the team will appreciate the success of the adaptation period. We have a well-developed feedback system, so if something goes wrong, especially if a beginner does something contrary to our culture, colleagues and a mentor explain to him what the problem is and help to correct behavior.


Miro New Employee Adaptation Plan

In addition, a Culture Code meeting is held for beginners every few months, where they talk about the company's culture, the history of the emergence of values ​​and examples of behavior that confirm them. Once a quarter, the CEO meets with newcomers to Founder talks, where he talks about the company's history, mission, vision, strategy, and tricks.

results


All of the above allowed us to solve the difficulties that we encountered at the beginning of the stage of rapid growth:

  • The “bottleneck” has disappeared from the hiring process. The CEO handed over the final hiring decisions to the hiring managers due to the fact that we have formulated the values ​​and principles of decision-making in Culture Code and the whole team agrees with them and knows how to work with them.
  • The interviews became more transparent: there were common assessment criteria, decisions became balanced and consistent, the reason for refusal became understandable, and the risks of hiring were fixed at the offer stage and worked out during adaptation.
  • All this has led to the fact that since the start of work on culture, the number of employees has grown 6 times, and the level of turnover has dropped from 20-30% to 5%, and at the moment it is only 2%. For an international company of 300 people, this is an excellent indicator.



Now we are working on the following stages of a deeper introduction of culture into the processes: we improve career planning, a reward system and the quality of internal communications.

What else to see and read


  1. Asana 's Culture as a Product Approach , the principles of which we have laid down in our process of working with culture
  2. : . Culture Code. — , People Team Lead, .
  3. , — HR API.
  4. () — , Head of Product.
  5. , : , Friday Wins Fails Night.

More articles:


All Articles