How We Improve Our Culture

Waaaait, how you can measure a culture?

Isn't culture something fluffy, especially for an engineer who cannot precisely explain what it is? And yet, you can feel it. As engineers, we all think that culture is something undefined in the air, however, we definitely appreciate it. For example, Open Source culture promotes a decentralized software development model, encourages open collaboration, and helps the community grow. We all love to use open source projects, right? And some of us love to contribute to open source.

But still, how can you measure culture? We are engineers, give us numbers and we will see how we can improve it.

Gathering data about Infobip‘s culture

The first step is to gather data. Initially, we conducted two workshops where our engineers shared what they love about Infobip's culture and what they are missing. We asked questions like what culture is and hat are its elements in IB, assessed current culture with respect to different company culture types / archetypes / job architecture, defined the culture we want to have with respect to company values and objectives and the job architecture. where we fall short of the culture we want to have and how to evolve to the goal state.

We knew that we have to confirm what we gathered through the workshops on a larger scale (department-wise). After some investigation, we decided the best fit for us would be to use an approach inspired by the DevOps Culture. We've created a survey with questions that should represent our culture. In 2020 when we had our first iteration of the Engineering culture Survey, 300 engineers filled out the survey, and the results were valuable!

All questions were labeled with categories to understand where we stand and what we can improve. Participants could answer with Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither agree nor disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree, or just leave it empty if they couldn't evaluate. This is the template with the questions we asked with its given category:

Results in 2020 and 2021: 84% of Engineers Enjoy Our Culture

We have to say that we are proud of the results and the team we have at Infobip. More than 84% stated that they enjoy our culture in Engineering, with engineers mostly responded positively to the majority of topics!

These are the results from 2021 (n=481) with comparison to 2020.

Great insights... Now what?

In 2020 we concluded that we should work on:

Transparency,
Innovation,
Focus on Customer and Culture
Branding & Evolvement.

Focus groups were organized and Engineers from different teams were included in sessions and brainstorming of what can be improved. After a few sessions, groups had brilliant ideas improvement suggestions:

Engineers voted for the best ideas and we implemented these top-voted items:

Infobip tech Medium and dev.to account (Culture Branding & Evolvement)
Engineering Insider (Transparency)
Hack days (Innovation)
Quarterly Business Reviews (Transparency/Focus on Customer)
Transparent inclusion of A-team in the top technical challenges in order to reuse solutions (Focus on customer)

Next steps?

Iterate, iterate and iterate. We follow up every year where we stand with our culture and improve together with you, engineers of Infobip. The process looks like this:

Infobip People Survey

Since 2022 our Company culture and Values became part of Infobip People Survey, and there was no more need for separate survey on Engineering culture. Infobip People Survey measures different components and overall Employee engagement.

Employee engagement represents the levels of enthusiasm and connection employees have with their organization. Studies have revealed a positive relationship between employee engagement and organizational results: productivity, employee retention, customer loyalty, and profitability. It's what many organizations and employees aspire to.

The purpose of People Surveys is to gauge employee engagement and recognize the key factors that drive us, so we can continuously work on improving in the most impactful areas. We use Pulse Checks as quick check-ins to see how everyone is doing between the annual People Surveys.

Statements included in the Culture and Values factor are:

Our company values are not just words, it’s what we live every day
I feel recognized for my behaviors, not just deliverables
I am comfortable expressing my honest thoughts
I’m not afraid to act and make mistakes, I’m encouraged to learn from them
My manager leads by example (acts in line with Infobip's values and principles of work)
My actions and decisions aim to deliver value for the customer (clients, employees, partners, etc.)

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Last updated 1 year ago