SMELLS LIKE TEAM SPIRIT
Perhaps the biggest change is that team building isn’t an occasional large production event but – as one firm puts it – baked into the fabric of the building – and a core aspect of day-to-day working life" If you’ve ever felt your team could benefit from working together to save the Earth from a giant meteor, journeying to Egypt to defeat evil Anubis (your arch nemesis) or planning to escape from a secret house hidden beneath a Cambridge street, LockHouse Games could be the perfect solution. Teams, consisting of between two and seven people, discover clues, solve problems and open locks in a bid to free themselves and humanity as well. Expect to see several new, exciting escape games appearing over the next few months. LOCKHOUSE GAMES
An intern recently organised evening drinks so that she and several other newcomers could get to know the rest of the team. About 25 people showed up – a sizeable chunk of the workforce. Redgate, whose products are described by Jeff Foster, head of Product Engineering as “software you actually want rather than have to use”, is another company to create a culture that’s light years away from “a factory style of management where the person at the top is just telling everyone what to do and how to do it”, says Jeff. The talented teams who create the software need “freedom to act, a clear purpose and a drive to learn”, he explains. This involves giving them the means, and agency, to do whatever they need to solve the problem. Everything is designed with this in mind, from the cooked breakfast and lunch – available to all – to the cunning positioning of the only coffee maker on the ground floor, not to reduce caffeine intake but to get people congregating in the same place and encouraging them to talk to each other. Ad hoc discussions
on the comfortable sofas downstairs are a day-to-day part of the team-building process, while formal meetings also have a different feel, with an emphasis on fun with a purpose. And you can forget the stereotyped notion of solitary software engineers sticking their headphones on, not talking to another human being and then going home, stresses Jeff. “That couldn’t be further from the truth.” Friday afternoons at Redgate is ‘10 per cent time’ (literally so, as it’s a tenth of the working week), when different teams share their experiences, good and bad. “If a team is playing with a particular new technology that’s working really well, we want that across the company. Equally important, if a team has done something that hasn’t worked, we want everyone to learn from that experience as well,” says Jeff. Building on this is the monthly Redgate ‘unconference’ – like a conference but with an empty agenda. “People suggest talks and then collaboratively create a programme of events for the afternoon,” Jeff adds.
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