Is it necessary to first build a giant company like Google and then start developing a corporate culture? Right from the startup times, we believe, it’s better to lay a solid foundation for the relationships between management and the team, as well as among team members. A lot of the team principles appreciated by Googlers are organizational matters rather than those demanding sky-high budgets.
In this article, you will find useful tips on how to maintain your company culture and ensure strong engineering culture and productivity stay the same when business scales. Moreover, we’ll explore how to hand-pick tech professionals able to adopt that culture for years ahead.
How to Maintain Company Culture: 12 Key Tips for IT Sector
So, how to maintain culture in a growing company? It is all about investing time and effort in the 12 directions below. Step by step, you’ll get a scalable skeleton of your corporate identity. What layers will come next depends on your management style, domain and current business goals.
#1. Vision, Mission, and Values. Keep in mind that seasoned company leaders make all the decisions taking into account whether they coincide with the Vision, Mission, and Values. When building your team, it’s necessary to engage specialists who support all these points and remind your team members about these basics.
#2. Engineering Standards. Develop clear standards for code quality, testing, and project delivery and share them with the team.
#3. Tooling and Infrastructure. Regularly assess and update development tools and use one of the most popular IDEs for developers to stay current with industry best practices.
#4. Communication. Arrange regular team meetings, stand-ups, and discussions to share updates, challenges, and successes. Yet, it’s not enough if you wonder how to maintain culture as a company scales. There are 2 crucial success factors for a growing international team:
Clear asynchronous communication, as it’s easier to navigate through structured threads every time you need to clarify the task details;
Well-documented development process, as it helps you avoid guessing the thoughts of the team members who worked on the task before.
#5. Collaboration. Agile development team structure with its cross-functional project teams and fractal scaling can be a rational solution when your project scope grows.
#6. Autonomy. Encourage ownership of projects, code, and processes. Give your team members autonomy in decision-making to instill a sense of responsibility.
#7. Continuous Learning. Provide opportunities for skill-building, training, and attending conferences.
#8. Feedback and Recognition. Establish a feedback loop for constructive criticism and improvement. Empathy is critical, so celebrate individual and team achievements regularly. Recognize innovative solutions and problem-solving approaches.
#9. Work-Life Balance. Stand for taking breaks, vacations, and flexible work hours when possible. Remember that optimal workload brings stable results. It’s impossible to extend team members’ duties to infinity when you are adjusting to evolving technologies and market demands. Think of tech recruitment and staffing services when you need extra hands and/or specialized expertise.
#10. Diversity and Inclusion. Promote diversity and inclusion throughout hiring campaigns. Create a supportive work environment for engineers where everyone feels valued and respected.
#11. Leadership Development. Invest in leadership development programs for engineers who show leadership potential. Encourage mentorship and knowledge sharing within the team. Thus, you can keep your top talent motivated and decrease the probability of their quitting at the turning stages of a developer’s life cycle.
#12. Traditions. A good idea is to hold hackathons, celebrate holidays and special events in teammates’ lives together with the team. It could be New Year, your sysadmin’s wedding, the International Developer’s day, and many more dates. Such traditions should scale together with a company.
In general, managing an organizational culture goes smoothly when it is an ongoing and agile process. This reminds us of iterative development, where feedback is crucial for refining and improving each iteration.
How to Effectively Scale a Tech Team With the Help of the Outstaffing Agency?
Spot that your team is ready for scaling
The deadlines are missed — missed deadlines are a perfect indicator a tech team needs scaling and adjusting.
The team requires specific knowledge to succeed — tech positions evolve and tech requirements change. To keep up with them, tech teams need to grow and add new talent.
The company grows — a growing business imposes the need to grow on all its departments, tech included.
Make sure an outstaffing agency has a multi-layered interview process
84% of recruiters say a culture fit is one of the most important points of the hiring process. HR professionals are looking for those with the best and most modern knowledge and make sure new hires fit the team and company culture to a T.
Here is where a multi-layered hiring process comes to the rescue. When turning to an outstaffing agency, make sure they conduct several rounds of interviews and know about the specificities of your company culture and the intricacies of your work.
To hire the best candidates, we at Outstaff Your Team:
Conduct preliminary interviews and see if a candidate can proceed
Help our clients check every candidate’s soft and hard skills
Conduct face-to-face interviews online or in-person
Take notice of even the most minor details in candidates’ behavior or attitude
Make sure candidates’ values and work outlook align with ones of our clients’
Reject candidates if they do not seem like a good fit
These steps help us make sure we provide our clients with the best and most valid tech candidates in the international job market.
Learn their approach to managing organizational culture in the long run
The first thing to evaluate is the structured onboarding. Do you see tech teams onboarding services among the list of outstaffing options? It’s a good sign, as the first steps within the company have an immense impact on a specialist’s productivity. Onboarding should include paper signing, security training, and learning company policies. When we allocate enough time for newcomers to immerse into a team, they have an opportunity to get all the necessary explanations and will not interrupt their flow for clarifications in the future.
Secondly, be curious about your partner’s beliefs and attitudes towards how to maintain company culture. For instance, we offer 3 main procedures.
Milestone talks. Those talks sum up the results of the specialists within their projects. Usually, we conduct the first milestone talk after 2 months of probation period, the second one — after 6 months in a company, the third one — after the first year. This frequency is approved by a client, so it can be different. If necessary, we can help our clients with correct evaluation of the team members’ progress.
Well-being checks. It is a satisfaction test. We need to know if specialists’ results meet their expectations of team members and provide them with human support when necessary. Actually, well-being checks can be combined with milestone talks.
Exit interviews. This is a perfect tool to uncover insights into the reasons behind a specialist’s quitting. By understanding the factors influencing turnover, like leadership, communication, and overall workplace experiences, companies can implement targeted improvements to align with their desired culture. Additionally, exit interviews capture institutional knowledge, preventing the loss of valuable insights that departing team members may possess.
Adjust your expectations
When venturing into international tech hiring, expectations of lightning-fast hiring or next-to-zero cost of the process are almost certain to turn into a disappointment. One of the best ways to have correct expectations from the hiring process:
Study the market;
Communicate all the requirements to the outstaffing professionals;
Know exactly what your new teammates have to know to be successful;
Keep your outstaffing professionals in the know about the project’s objectives and your approach to maintaining company culture.
Having the right expectations and knowing exactly what they are looking for will help any business hire tech specialists without disrupting their strong company culture and efficiency.
Check for automation
About 50% of today’s work can be automated. For HR professionals, this number is even higher — 56%. About half of HR professionals think automation will make their work easier, especially when it comes to recruitment.
Every efficient outstaffing team has to have an automation system that will help them sort through hundreds of CVs faster. An applicant tracking system also takes on routine tasks, like testing, responding to resumes, and categorizing candidates according to their skills.
At Outstaff Your Team, such system not only ensures correct categorization and processing of candidates’ information. It also allows us to sort through our candidate base and find the tech professionals with the required skills faster, which speeds up the interviewing process and ensures we fill our clients’ positions fast.
Promote trust
Trust is one of the most important aspects of the outstaffing process. It should also be present in your relationship with the candidates and newbies hired with their help. Their integration into the team should be controlled, but they should also have the freedom to express their opinion and implement new solutions that will ultimately help your product grow and your company culture develop.
Trusting everyone involved in an outstaffing process is an integral part of scaling companies with the help of this model.
Keep in touch
Correct and constant communication is the key to success, especially when entrusting your hiring to a third party. Never hesitate to discuss all the hiring stages, post-hiring outstaffing processes and all the changes in managing the organizational culture of your company.
Can Company Culture Be Preserved When the Tech Team Is Expanded Remotely?
We at Outstaff Your Team say — absolutely.
As we concluded in one of our previous blog posts, it’s hard to ignore that 98% of people like remote work and 77% of specialists claim they are more productive when working from home. We at Outstaff Your Team know for sure — tech team augmentation, remote operations, preserving, and scaling company culture do mix. Online team building, regular one-on-one meetings and virtual water-cooler gatherings, although quite simple, can be very effective when it comes to extending the team remotely.
Company culture usually takes years to establish and a huge effort to maintain. We know you do your best to move in that direction. With the help of the right outstaffing partner who knows all the secrets to selecting perfect tech candidates, onboarding newcomers, managing custom NDAs, contracts, payroll, and daily operations routine, your software development culture and productivity will become even better.
Interested in scaling your tech team? Reach out to us at [email protected].
FAQ
How does the company maintain its culture?
Maintaining company culture includes attraction-selection-attrition, new employee onboarding, leadership, and organizational reward systems. We can say that a company has an established culture when it has a clear and well-documented mission, corporate policies and rituals like sharing weekly/monthly reports or attending foreign language clubs. Also, transparent communication is a sign of good company culture. Specialists from the companies where they were heard, usually, rate their company culture higher.
How do you scale a company culture?
As you grow, be receptive to cultural shifts. While some core values endure, others may evolve. Adapt policies as it is a robust way to sustain the shared identity. When scaling company culture, communicate values clearly across all levels. Then, seek out feedback from your team by encouraging open dialogue.
What are the scaling strategies?
The proven approach is building a clear strategy that outlines key milestones one, five, and 10 years down the line — and beyond. You will need to constantly sync the reality with your plans, ensuring that you grow at a sustainable rate.
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