There’s No Place Like Hello World

We're going to start with a technicolor metaphor. Sorry not sorry.

The Wizard of Oz is about a "normal" girl from Kansas being literally dropped into a strange new world with bizarre rules, unfamiliar beliefs, and strange behaviors. Her main goal is to get home, but in order to accomplish this, she has to work with the people inhabiting this new environment. She must learn their way of working to survive and achieve her goals by building relationships with the people she meets along the way.

As a metaphor for how we feel when starting a new job or going onto a new team, this narrative works surprisingly well. Who hasn’t felt out of place in a new work environment and unsure about their place and performance? Especially now that many of us work in a remote world, there is a lot of uncertainty that can come with our first day.

That story also works as a pretty good framework for how to build a culture that protects new people and acculturates them into the spoken and unspoken expectations of "how we work." But before we get into that, let’s talk about workplace culture. We love to talk about building it and how we need it to be good. Sometimes we brag that our companies have a good one, but do we really know what we are doing with it?

One of the things I've noticed in the software world with conversations about "building culture" and "improving psychological safety" is that we don't know how to intentionally create this environment beyond the basic concepts like "be nice to each other" and "don't say racist things in meetings". The anti-harassment training and similar HR-provided tools are an excellent first step, but they don’t get us past this 101 level. As a culture, we don't tend to have any formal processes or tools to create a culture that encourages belonging for individuals.

We can aspire to provide a psychologically safe workplace, but the "how do we get there" manual is usually missing from our institutional knowledge and best practices. Sometimes it feels like we are in desperate need of a pair of ruby slippers, or in some cases, a weaponized house.

If we are in that phase of trying to get there, but not knowing how, it can be a struggle. I’ve worked at companies whose best efforts aren't really that great and consist of a handful of yearly mandatory trainings with no follow-through or help with practical application. Other places seemed to rely on the 'sink or swim' model of cultural integration, combined with various levels of hazing to enforce existing cultural norms.

Lacking an explicit foundation of "how to create culture" makes life harder for everyone, but especially for new employees. No matter your tenure at a company or experience with your profession, there is always a moment where, when joining a new environment, you have to learn how to work there. Even in standardized fields, ways of working and expected behaviors vary quite a lot between teams and companies. This variance is worse in tech, where one of our profession's main characteristics is that there is rarely one standard way to do anything. This flexibility of process is one of our strengths, but if not taken into consideration when we build our culture and mentorship, it can do significant harm to individuals, teams, and the company as a whole.

Once we have identified the problem, if we don't look for solutions, we become part of the problem. So, before we go to OZ, let’s take a detour through my career path. When I switched careers from law enforcement to software engineering, going to my coding bootcamp did nothing to prepare me for the culture shock of going from a quasi-military public sector workplace to the private sector cubicle farm. It was just as strange as being dropped into Oz, and in some ways, just as difficult.

The first clue that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore should have been when I showed up on my first day. My manager met me at the front desk and told me, “We’re going to have our team meetings in this conference room today. They haven’t built your desk yet.”

“They” turned out to be the team’s lead staff engineer rather than someone who had “build furniture” in their job description. My confusion was similar to Dorothy’s when everyone started singing about her house getting dropped on someone. Why was a staff engineer hammering away on office furniture?

However, once my desk was built, I had officially entered the world of Being a Software Developer. As I struggled to learn the job as was expected of me, I started observing my coworkers to see how they worked.

My observations were as follows:

Software developers wear a lot of plaid.

Since I had never worn "business casual" in my life, I relied mostly on my coworker's fashion choices to dictate what this looked like. Therefore I bought a couple of long-sleeved plaid button ups to wear over my normal t-shirts. Unfortunately, that camouflage was not particularly successful in integrating me into the culture.

Seniority requires random lectures

It was perfectly acceptable to spend hours lecturing junior developers on non-work topics. The staff engineer of “making my desk” fame often cornered me at that desk to share his opinions on a variety of topics, some of which were political, religious, and otherwise inappropriate for work. This conversation was sometimes prompted by me needing to ask him for help with something in the code base. Because of this, I tried to avoid asking for help as much as possible.

Lack of context is a you problem

If someone can’t can't figure it out for themselves, that's their problem. Not only did this make learning how to write software extremely difficult, it also made the workplace unpleasant for everyone. This really struck home when I had asked our QA engineer a question about her testing process. After she answered my question, she paused, then asked, "Do you mind If I ask you for help on this other thing?" Her absolute surprise when I said "sure" and then walked her through her issue told me all I needed to know about her workplace experience.

The meetings will continue until morale improves.

We had a lot of meetings that involved the Spotify Squad Health Check model. Seated around a conference room with our remote workers dialed in on the speakerphone, we dutifully used the red/yellow/green model to answer questions about our work in front of our manager. Needless to say, I never said anything was red, even though my day to day was upholstered with red flags.

Every day became a struggle which severely impacted my mental health and ability to do my job. I had no Good Witch Glinda show up to give me guidance on how to work in this strange technicolor world, and no one willing to stop and help a stranger on the way. My example might be extreme due to the massive difference in culture, it illustrates how joining a new team can be difficult, especially when we aren’t good at being aware of how our culture is constructed.

So how do we do it right? We give people guides to that culture.

Returning to my metaphor, Dorothy had her friends: the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Lion and even her little dog too. Each of these individuals played a significant part in providing her guidance as she made her way through Oz. We don’t need song and dance numbers to also provide this support in our own workplaces. All we need to do is create a culture of mentorship and learning to guide new employees to a softer landing.

This culture is created by having three qualities that can enable everyone to succeed: courage, compassion, and excitement to learn. These qualities are not necessarily innate to office culture but they are also not hard to nurture. We just have to intentionally look for our courage, our hearts, and our brains. Thankfully, we often find that we had them with us all along.

The first one can be the hardest. Trying to affect change in a workplace culture takes a lot of courage. It requires a certain level of vulnerability combined with a willingness to put ourselves on the line to reach out our hand to others. Sometimes we need to create zones of psychological safety for others, even if we ourselves don’t feel that way.

Compassion for ourselves and our coworkers is an understated quality in any workplace. Not only can we use this to assume positive intent when we are discussing our work, but we can also use it to understand and have empathy for people different from ourselves. This is especially important when we are talking to people who don’t come from the same backgrounds or have the same education or life experiences.

Encouraging an excitement to learn is my favorite. When a new person asks a bunch of questions, is it the workplace’s cultural response to get annoyed at their lack of knowledge? Or do we intentionally view it as an opportunity to share our knowledge with someone and grow their expertise? It can be incredibly frightening to ask a “stupid question.” Rewarding that excitement to learn with our own excitement to teach reinforces and creates a cultural value around knowledge and support.

If everyone integrates these characteristics into their daily work, we create a culture that is not only more collaborative, but also more psychologically safe. It also becomes a culture that is easily spread. When one person feels encouraged, supported, and excited to learn, they transfer that to the next person. If your workplace culture makes an intentional effort to support these values, then it becomes a place to work where people feel safe and feel like they can belong.

To get to this place, we all have to be invested in helping each other be courageous, have compassion as we learn, and are excited to share our knowledge. Once we apply that to our culture, it becomes a place that feels like home. And there’s no place like home.