Culture so strong you experience it before your first day: That’s the goal of the people and operations team at email provider Superhuman. Zoë Johannas, director of people ops and development, said her team accomplishes this mission by sending each new hire an individualized growth plan well before their start date.
“Not only do we think this adds a delightful touch, but we also hope it helps even our newest employees feel our intentionality at work,” Johannas said.
A team culture that prizes flexibility and autonomy: That’s the experience of engineers at Zoom. Hunter Goodreau, a front-end software engineer, told Built In San Francisco that this specific focus was chosen to “ensure that team members are working on projects that they are passionate about, which helps keep them engaged and motivated.”
Superhuman and Zoom have taken an intentional and actionable approach to building their company cultures. Both companies are hiring now, and you can read more about the characteristics and values that underpin their cultures and the additional impacts they make on the employee experience below.
Zoom is an enterprise video communications platform. In addition to video calls, the company also offers solutions for virtual whiteboarding, online events and customer support.
What are the key characteristics of a good team culture, and what are some ways you and your team bring those characteristics or values to life?
Good team culture is built on a foundation of clear and effective communication, personal responsibility and flexibility. My team makes an effort to regularly communicate with each other, raise flags early when issues arise and stay on track with our individual tasks. We also strive to be flexible and adaptable so that we can support each other by picking up tasks when needed and working together to overcome obstacles.
We try to remain flexible and allow team members to select the tasks that they find most interesting and challenging for each sprint.”
How do you ensure members of your team continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
To achieve this, we try to remain flexible and allow team members to select the tasks that they find most interesting and challenging for each sprint. This helps ensure that team members are working on projects that they are passionate about, which helps keep them engaged and motivated.
Do you have any unique team celebrations, traditions or rituals to celebrate successes?
We have a few unique traditions that we use to celebrate successes and build team morale. For example, we have bi-weekly happy hours where we get together virtually to chat and play games. We also celebrate milestone launches with virtual celebrations, and in the future we hope to be able to do some in-person meetups as well. These traditions help bring our team closer together and create a sense of camaraderie, which can be especially important for remote teams like ours.
Superhuman is an email provider whose inbox is designed to help people move through their emails faster and more efficiently. Its email client features built-in read statuses, follow-up reminders and social media insights.
What are the key values of a good team culture, and what are some ways you and your team bring those characteristics or values to life?
We approach building a great culture by starting with our values. We chose our three core values — create delight, remarkable quality and be intentional — as an authentic reflection of Superhumans at our best and how we seek to operate.
Our values come up regularly as we develop our goals for each quarter, design company programs and create opportunities for connection across the team. New hires see how we live our values even before their first day with personalized offer letters featuring individualized growth paths. Not only do we think this adds a delightful touch, but we also hope it helps even our newest employees feel our intentionality at work.
Our values have even become a part of our company lingo! For example, we provide our managers with “delight budgets” to help them bring a little extra sparkle to their teams throughout the year, and we train our whole team on what “quality” looks like from the perspective of our QA team. While small moments, these are examples of how we bring our values to our day-to-day life and use them to build a connected culture.
New hires see how we live our values even before their first day with personalized offer letters featuring individualized growth paths.”
How do you ensure members of your team continue to feel challenged, engaged and excited by the work they’re doing?
One of the most impactful ways we ensure our team continues to feel engaged and excited by the path ahead is through our growth and development program. We ask that each manager carve out dedicated one-on-one growth time every four to six weeks to talk about progress, challenges and goals and align on the path ahead. Making sure managers and their teams are in sync about how they’re contributing to company goals and on the same page about opportunities to stretch and improve goes a long way to keep a growing team feeling connected to the big picture. We also offer a professional development budget to each employee to help them invest in external support to level up their skills.
Beyond one-on-one connection points, we create several avenues to hear and respond to team feedback throughout the year, including 360-degree reviews, team surveys and a commitment to an open Q&A time at every all-hands meeting.
Do you have any unique team celebrations, traditions or rituals to celebrate successes?
One of our longest-standing team traditions is Friday wins, a weekly gathering where we celebrate both professional and personal wins from the week. Friday wins provides a fun opportunity to hear about new cross-functional projects, come into contact with new team members from across the organization and to get to know each other on a personal level. We might hear about a new product or feature launch, share learnings, meet new hires or see photos from a dream vacation!
We wrap up Friday wins every week by looking at some of our recent customer testimonials and connecting our accomplishments to our mission.
