Team Culture

Team culture is subtle. It depends on the team members and leaders. Each person should feel happy to come to work, feel excited to work on things and contribute to work. They should also feel safe to ask question or express their own opinions.

The senior leaders play an important role on what type of team culture individual teams will have. Whether the teams are under constant pressure of time lines, whether the teams are being criticized when they fail, whether teams have time to experiment on new technologies or make improvement on devops pipelines. Team cultures are not bottom up and solely being decided by team members, but greatly influenced by senior leaders, who influence how mid level managers will interact with their teams.

Ray Dalio’s book Principles: Life and Work showed very good principles for a company’s culture to be highly transparent and highly visible. Except a small percentage of communications at work need to be kept confidential, such as related to compensation, feedbacks during one-on-ones, etc, most of the communications can be made public and shared with whoever interested.

With highly visible and highly transparent culture, information is readily available to everyone. It is not like only certain people hold information like some secrets. That may create back talking or gossiping. With information available to many people, employees can also comment on company’s operations or give feedbacks.

Fairness is critical at work. The opposite of fairness is favoritism or work bullying, which are toxic. A certain person or a group of people are treated either favorably or being undermined or constantly criticized unrelated to their performance. This will result in low morale and low productivity at work and people not engage much at work.