How to maintain non-toxic team culture in your company?

After talking about providing your developers the best developer experience and why invest in the automatization, let’s move on to other parts of the story. We all know how important it is to have a non-toxic team culture, which defines a great developer experience [1]. The real question is how to make your company Employee first company which will be a safe place for developers, so they won’t even think about seeking other job opportunities. Check how our guardian kustodian_ can help you.

Developer onboarding is a process of familiarizing a new employee with a new job and environment: what tasks are to be solved, who is sitting at the next desk, what working processes are like, and where a coffee machine is at last [2]. To facilitate this process, it would be good to assign a mentor, or as we like to call them – buddy, to a new developer, someone who will guide him in the onboarding process. Heidi Helfand, the author of the book Dynamic Reteaming, said that feeling included is very important at the beginning of a new employee’s journey and recommends selecting mentors for your new employees so mentors can provide the most attention to them [3].

kustodian_ makes sure that a buddy is assigned to a new developer in the Onboarding journey where the user profile of the new developer is created. Buddy will be notified about his new developer’s arrival and have enough time to prepare everything to welcome him to the company and team in the best possible way.

Figure 1 is familiar to you if you have read one of our last blogs. Although the new developer will meet the team members, it would be nice to have access to the page where he can check how his new team members are named if he forgets because he will be overwhelmed with the information. Except for the names of his teammates, it would be good for him to know which positions they are on.

IT industry is still very young and people in it might think about it mostly in a technical sense like which architecture will fit the functional and non-functional requirements. We shouldn’t forget that we are humans who have emotions and need to feel purpose and joy from our work. Except for delivering the software, developers should feel good about it [4]. A lot of people struggle with asking for help at work but asking for help will provide them with new skills [5]. But when they are finally encouraged to ask someone, there goes the question, who to ask? What else would be cool is to have some page where you can search for everything you need to know about your coworker and most importantly which skills does he have that interest you.

Figure 2 shows all important information in one place from basic information such as a cell phone number to the skills an employee has. To make your new developer feel like a part of the team, his team will include him in the team routines they have like daily or teambuilding and similar.

Today, many people work remotely, so it would be good to have some indicator of whether someone is working at the home office and whether someone is on vacation or on sick leave. In that way, everyone can know where their teammates are.

Developers switch a lot between different projects, so it is for sure useful to know which projects developers are currently on and on which they are offboarded. In case his coworkers need some information about projects that the developer was on, they will find that information also.

When leaders of an organization try everything to make their company center of nontoxic team culture, their developers will fit in easier and be happy [6]. If you want to invest in your team culture, let guardian kustodian_ help you and make your company a productive workplace with satisfied developers.