If you want to truly understand company culture and ways to improve performance a good place to start is with your developers. I have the privilege of gaining deep insights into our customers’ organisations through the feedback and experiences of our development teams. When our developers and quality engineers integrate with a customer’s team, they engage directly with the company’s culture, processes, and operational efficiency. This unique fresh eyes perspective allows us to offer not just IT solutions but also strategic advice to help our customers improve holistically and outperform their competitors.
The Pulse of Company Culture
Our developers and engineers work closely across most departments within our customers’ organisations. Through this engagement, they gather valuable insights into the company’s culture and operational dynamics. Here are the top 5 points on company culture that I focus on when presenting to our customers’ board on top of stakeholders’ delivery report.
- Onboarding Process
The onboarding process is often the first interaction new employees and teams have with the company’s culture and operations. Our teams provide insights into how effectively a customer welcomes and integrates new hires. A smooth, comprehensive onboarding process indicates a well-organised, supportive environment, while a chaotic or inadequate process can signal deeper issues.
Onboarding inefficiencies are rarely discussed, invested in, or tracked with metrics. For example, bringing on a new team of 8 people with a 4-week onboarding process instead of 2 weeks results in a delay of 16 man-weeks and an increased cost of approximately 6,400 euros, based on a nearshore team. This inefficiency is a costly drag on agility. At Estafet, we commit to delivering into production in 6 weeks, so we cannot afford to linger in an inefficient onboarding process. Where chaos exists, we document as we go and leave the customer in a better place when we leave. - Communication and Collaboration
Our teams often witness firsthand the level of communication and collaboration within a customer’s organisation. Whether it’s seamless interdepartmental cooperation or noticeable silos, these observations help identify strengths and areas for improvement. Sharing these insights with the customer’s leadership fosters initiatives to bridge gaps and enhance teamwork.
For example, in digital transformation projects within large enterprises, we often work with multiple large system integrators who operate in silos. When we facilitate direct communication among these integrators, it’s often the first time they’ve collaborated directly, focusing on the customer’s transformation objectives rather than their own delivery goals. We measure collaboration and work to break down silos, ensuring data flows through the business to where it adds value. - Openness to Failure and Risk
Innovation requires a culture that tolerates failure and embraces calculated risks. Our teams quickly assess whether a company is punitive towards mistakes or encourages learning from them. This understanding helps guide our customers towards fostering a more innovative and resilient culture. For example, failing early is fantastic and dramatically increases productivity through learning. - Processes and Efficiency
We promise to deliver software to a customer’s production systems in 6 weeks. This pressure and focused objective quickly expose inefficiencies in processes that can significantly hamper productivity. By integrating with a customer’s workflow, our developers identify bureaucratic hurdles, manual processes, and inefficiencies. This enables us to recommend process improvements that streamline operations, reduce bottlenecks, and enhance and automate to improve efficiency, and lower costs. - Openness to Change and Continual Improvement
Our developers are at the cutting edge of technology and methodologies. Their interaction with a customer’s processes can reveal whether the organisation is adaptable and open to continual improvement. We advise on adopting more agile and forward-thinking practices, ensuring our customers remain competitive and innovative.
By listening to the insights from our software developers and quality engineers, companies can gain a better understanding of their own operations and culture. These insights can lead to actionable improvements, fostering a more efficient, innovative, and resilient organisation. We are committed to delivering bespoke software solutions and helping our customers through transparency of working with continual improvement.
By Adrian Wright, CEO and Founder of Estafet
