As the CEO of Urban Airship — a Portland, Oregon company that offers tools for building mobile software applications — Scott Kveton oversees a team of 121 employees, including 75 developers and other technical types. One afternoon, Barb Stark walked into his office, and in typical fashion, she unloaded a plan to further the education of these hard-core programmers.
“I need you to just say yes to something,” she told Kveton.
“Yes,” he said, before pausing. “What did I just say yes to?”
“Hiring a choreographer to come in and teach the team how to do the Thriller dance for the Halloween party.”
“Cool,” the boss replied.
Stark is Urban Airship’s “director of culture.” Her job is to ask questions for stuff like this — she starts many a conversation with “This may sound crazy, but” — and Kveton usually says yes. The aim is make life more enjoyable for the company’s developers, and though some aren’t always comfortable with her handiwork, they say she manages to keep them happy.
“As your stereotypical socially awkward introvert geek, I’ve ducked out of a couple Barb parties over the years, but never because I didn’t think they would be amazing,” says Michael Schurter, a developer and the second employee hired by the company. “The parties are where you learn your coworkers aren’t just programming automatons or sometimes even obnoxious adversaries — but people with friends and families with lives and dreams outside our little workday bubble.”
It’s easy to be cynical about efforts to create a “culture” around a team of software developers. Team-building activities are notoriously hokey, and the notion of a “work hard, play hard” lifestyle has become so trite, it’s meaningless. Tech companies are littered with Nerf guns and foosball tables that never get used. But for Schurter and other Urban Airship employees, there’s a self-awareness to Stark’s work that makes it different.
“Even when I have skipped, she’s caught wind of it, gently ribbed me to change my mind, and then congratulated me on good work/life balance when I wouldn’t give in,” Schurter says. This demonstrates that the parties aren’t about monopolizing employee’s personal time or establishing social pecking orders, he explains. They’re about creating an environment where work is not your life.
Urban Airship sees its culture as a key competitive advantage over other software outfits in the Portland area and beyond. The company doubled its employees in 2012, and it plans to more than double again in 2013. It now has a growing office in London, as well as outposts in Palo Alto and San Francisco, after acquiring two other software companies: Telo and SimpleGeo.
Kveton says the company has an low turnover rate — about 13% — and that Stark is a big part of that. Schurter agrees. “I’m not sure I would still be here without her influence,” he says.
Stark started out as the company’s office manager, handling everything from accounting, HR, and facilities to reception, and she has done similar work for several other companies, including old school corporations as well as software startups. “I’ve always been a bit of a generalist,” she says.
As the company grew she gave up parts of her role to full-time employees — an accountant, a receptionist, an HR specialist — and eventually became Kveton’s executive assistant. But she missed the intimacy of a smaller company, and she eventually left for another startup. When the new job didn’t fit her sensibilities, she returned to Urban Airship as its minister of culture.
Culture, Stark says, is “the way things are done around here.” It’s more than just dance routines, parties, and ping pong tournaments. Kveton says the work itself needs to be fun, and there need to be as few barriers to getting your work done as possible.
To that end, the company borrowed the idea of “Free Friday” from another software development outfit, Atlassian. Once a quarter, employees can work on anything they want for 24 hours, so long as they share the results with the company at the end. The company’s relationship with SimpleGeo started out as a Free Friday project and ended up as an acquisition. Kveton says they plan is to make Free Fridays happen more often, perhaps once a month.
The company also holds a regular Friday “happy hour,” a company-wide meeting where everyone talks about what they’ve been working on. But the company does try to keep the meetings to a minimum, and employs strict rules — such as a no multi-tasking policy — to make them as short and effective as possible. And when bigger meetings do happen, the company is aggressively transparent, sharing such details as quarterly revenue, cash on hand, and burn rate.
Stark organizes the parties, and she works with the executives on drafting policies and programs like Free Friday. But she also works at a much smaller, interpersonal level. She makes a point of getting the employees out of the office, arguing that it’s good for developers to get away from coding and talking about code once in a while. To help mix the technical and non-technical teams, she’ll setup lunches or microevents that involve a couple of developers and one or two non-technical staff.
She also handles facilities. She recently flew to Britain to find a new office for the company’s growing London team, making sure the space had the same vibe as the Portland office — a space that was open yet warm, creative yet professional.
Although her role is very much about growing the size of the company, she thinks that even an established company that has a steady plateau could do with a bit more cultural direction. At many companies, these attempts at “fun” would be greeted with cynicism. And not everyone at Urban Airship participates in everything. Only about 20 employees stuck with the Thriller dance. But Stark says her job works — mostly because she take’s it seriously. “I’m old enough to be pretty much be everybody’s mom,” she says. “That gives me perspective.”
Why Software Developers Should Learn the Thriller Dance
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Why Software Developers Should Learn the Thriller Dance
