Okay, good. Who likes the culture he's working in in his company? Who likes it?

Who thinks the culture is okay? Who thinks the culture sucks? Nobody. That's one. Okay, good. Well anyway, so fostering a company culture. So first we want to start a little bit with what is culture?

So what is culture? So what I did is what everybody does when he doesn't know what to say. He looks up at Wikipedia. Yeah, so I looked it up at Wikipedia and so Wikipedia says culture is about values. Great. Culture is about norms. Culture is about the language we speak at work. Culture is about a vision that we have. Culture is about the beliefs we have and culture is about our habits.

So I ask the question again. What is culture? Well, it's hard to explain actually to what culture is. It's this fluffy thing and it's like this rabbit here. So you can't really see what it is. But you know when you work in a company that has a great culture.

So let's start another way. Let's start with an example of a good culture. Well, we all know that we want to work for great startups. They have a great culture. Yeah, so two people sitting there having a great idea and they start their company.

And then their company grows. They are very passionate. They work very hard. They have this great idea. They work day in, day out, work the weekends. So really, really passionate and they build this cool culture around them. And they attract a lot of people, a lot of passionate people that want to work for these startups. And these people are also very passionate and you have these cool events with these people together, great office spaces.

And then the product grows. And maybe, yeah, you're very, very successful with your product, with this company you built. And then startups doing actually this here. They cash out. They cash out. They sell their company to the next big thing, go on the next big thing to a big, big company.

And so telling this is, this is not fostering a culture. So this is, you have created this great culture and then you sell your company. So, and you have to have this great culture. So, but this talk is actually about fostering a culture, keeping your culture,

try to grow your company and still keep the startup feeling within your organization. Okay, now we know a great example of culture. So let's look at destructive examples of cultures.

You have something in mind? Yeah? Yeah, I think we all heard of them. We talked to some friends or some colleagues or whatever. And then they tell us, oh, we are working this company and this sucks. And yeah, and somehow we feel sorry for those guys when they tell us. We feel a bit sorry.

So, but yeah, why are companies actually doing this? Why do they work still in these big hierarchies? And why does work have to suck? And why does culture have to suck? And why is it? I think it's his fault here. Does anybody know who that is?

It's Fereic Winslow Taylor, famous for his Taylorism. Last century, he started and he said, okay, we have machines and I want some efficient worker. I want to treat them like machines. Actually, Henry Ford said, I don't want my workers to think they should just come to work

at seven and leave at five or whatever and don't think at work. They should just do their job. And then they invented something. Okay, some people had also to think, so they invented the managers. The managers are there to think they are the thinkers and tell the workers what to do. Great, but times have actually changed.

Some companies are still operating like that where they tell us what we should do. But times have changed. And not only that, work has also changed. We are more knowledge workers right now. We are thinkers and people have changed. They want to work in a different culture. They want to really, really work in an innovative, great culture.

And companies, well, I think they change slowly, not as we want, as fast as we want, but they change very, very slowly to this more open culture. So we all know in the past, we were working like Fred Flintstone here. This seven o'clock or five o'clock and the horn rings and he says,

yabba-dabba-doo, goes to Vilma, that's how we worked in the past. But now we actually work a little bit more like the Incredibles. We want to work for a purpose. We want to start something, something cool. So saying that is in the past, people work for their pension or to feed their family.

Now we want to really, really work for a purpose. In the past, we were working from nine to five. Now we work whenever. In the past, we were working in the office. We were going to our office. Now we work wherever we want. We have the technology to do that. And in the past, we worked for the whole career at one place.

And we planned our whole career when we were 18. Now it's, yeah, whatever. So my name is Sven. I work for Atlassian. It's a company from Sydney, Australia. We do software, actually, we started doing software for software developers. Now we're doing software for business to make them more successful,

to make them more efficient, to make them more collaborative. And these are us. This is our, we don't dress up like this all the time. So it's our office in San Francisco, and they had a Halloween party. And coincidentally, our co-founder, I don't know if you can see that,

Scott Farquhar, he dressed up as Fred Flintstone. This is coincidence, so it has nothing to do with the culture. He's actually a great guy and fostering a very, very great culture. So I want to start telling you a bit about our innovation culture. So we have a culture at Atlassian of innovation. And this is really important for software development companies.

But as I said, we are a bunch of software developers. How do you innovate those people? Well, that's a stereotype. We don't look like that. We are also cool guys, software developers. But how do you motivate people to innovate? Well, you should give them time to try their own ideas.

They have great ideas. You just give them time. And we do that every quarter. And we call that Atlassian ship it days. So the purpose is to ship something innovative idea within 24 hours. So they got 24 hours of time, have their cool idea and hack for 24 hours. And then at the end, show their innovative idea to the whole company.

We show it to the whole company and show the whole company what great idea we had. And the whole company is seeing that. So this is really, really great. We do that every quarter trying to do things. But this is just prototyping. We wanted to have these innovation ideas also in our products.

And sometimes we cannot put them on a roadmap. So we came up with the next innovative idea. And we're doing innovation weeks. So every team does that at Atlassian independently. They do every six weeks, every seven weeks whenever they get time. But six weeks is a good cycle. They have one week to really, really make their cool ideas work in the product.

So we put this innovative ideas just in the product and they are ready for the next release. So and then we had this great idea. We had all this great minds, you know, all the people that came up with these awesome ideas. And we said, oh, great. We put those people that have these great ideas into one team.

And we call that the innovation team. And they come up with great ideas. It's our innovation team, our team that that really comes up with innovation. The problem was just that the rest of the company, they doesn't feel responsive. They didn't feel responsible anymore for for doing innovative things. And this is not what we want.

So we stopped this innovative team, innovation team. We said, OK, go back to your team. Everybody is Atlassian, is responsible or can do innovative things. And this is very, very important because actually innovation happens everywhere. And for me, it's actually I have my best ideas under the shower or during workout

and innovation happen. They it's happening within the company. But you just you should just give your your colleagues, your employees the possibility to grow your innovative ideas. OK, let's talk about culture for happiness. We all want to be happy, don't we?

So actually, Daniel Pink, he wrote this book, Drive. Has anybody read the Drive book? Yeah, cool. Great. Two, three people. Great. It's a great book. And actually, Daniel is talking about Atlassian Shipper Days. Well, we called it at that time Atlassian FedEx Days, but we were not allowed to call it FedEx Days anymore.

So but it's talking about intrinsic motivation. And this is really, really this thing here. It motivates you to do something. You can see your own idea come to life. This is really, really motivating. And that makes you really, really happy. As I said, it's sometimes hard for us to see the bigger picture. I mean, we are we are software developers doing software for other companies.

So we but we also want to make the world a better place, really. And motivation is to work for a reason. We want to work for a reason sometimes. And actually, we are software developers at Atlassian. So with us, it's called we code for a reason. And we got the opportunity from Atlassian to take one week off,

go on foundation, leave how we call it, and we can work for charity. And this is really, really motivating. But we are coders. And why? Why not just take our skills and let people help people? For example, the food bank in Amsterdam, they came to us and said, we need a new Web page, but we don't have money for that.

And you are a cool programmer. So can you create a Web page for us? And yeah, a bunch of guys, they took one week off of the foundation leave and they created a Web page. So now you can go to the Web page, donate food, see where you can get your food, see the opening times. And we have created this Web page. But sad that is we are just just a bunch of Atlassians.

So we are just maybe 300 developers, but there are so many great developers out there and they maybe also want to code for a reason. So what about the rest of the developers? So we actually created a Web page or a platform where charities can put in their charity projects

and developers can go in and actually work for them. So we bring those people together at makeitiff.org. Because working for a reason makes us actually happier people. Talking about happiness. Well, we are actually doing this, I think all companies are doing this.

This fun event. So we have this Friday event where we play old Arkard games. We have team building events where we go river rafting. And we have this family and friends day last year where the scene was carnival and we invited our family and friends. So that, well, a lot of companies are doing that. But does that really make us happy?

So how happy are you? Maybe you can tell it for yourself how happy you are at work. But what about your team? How happy is actually your team? Do you know that? Well, yeah, so companies are doing doing stuff like this. They ask their people every half a year or maybe every year.

How happy are you? What do you want to improve? Blah, blah, blah. But this sucks totally. And it's totally slow. Also, I cannot react very, very fast with this one. So we took actually in a stupid day. We said, OK, we have to fix this. And we came up with this iPad mood app. It's actually open source. You can download it.

So this is a mood app. And it says, how are you feeling today? And we have iPad stands at every exit at Atlassian. And you can say, OK, I'm feeling good today. I'm feeling not so good. And you can see really the the mood of the whole company there. And then we're measuring it. So so this is the result and we are adapting it. That's not always the same question.

So this was our after our company party. The mood app. So how do you feel today? And people didn't really feel very, very well. But you also want to learn from that. You want to change maybe some things. So actually Spotify is doing quite the same thing. And they found out that 91 percent of their employees were quite happy.

So they were quite happy. And but this was not enough. Ninety one percent was not enough. They want to have one hundred percent happiness. So what they did, actually, they talk to these unhappy people and change stuff. And then they came up with 94 percent happiness, which is which is better, but not not excellent.

But I think you cannot make actually every employee happy. That's an impossible thing. OK, and then you want to grow your your culture. How do you grow your culture if you if you grow your your team and your your company? So let's talk about numbers a little bit.

Twelve. Twelve is actually the natural team size. So when we were hunting back in the Stone Age, we were around 10 to 12 people hunting. So this is a natural team size, actually. Another number, one hundred fifty, one hundred fifty.

That's Dumber's number roundabout. So what what does Dumber's number tells us? Well, it tells us how how how how many stable social relationship we can maintain. And if companies actually grow above this number, sometimes 120, 180 depends. This becomes anonymous workplaces, really.

Well, maybe not because at Atlassian we're not anonymous workplaces. But what you actually get if you go grow your company above this, you have this silo problem. Well, you work in silos, the finance people and then the cool developers, and they don't understand each other and they don't want to understand each other.

So you have these silo problems. And actually, but what you want is in your culture, you want to to work as one company. You want to bring people actually together. HubSpot had a great idea. They did this face wall. So they have this at the corridor where they show actually employees and they show where they are working.

So if you go down the corridor, you can see David. Maybe David is working in finance. And next day you're sitting in the in the canteen next to David and talk to Dave and say, I need some finance advice here. How do I do that? So you really grow the company together. It's not that anonymous anymore.

But we are Atlassian, we're doing also something something else. We actually want to give people a face. And if if they started Atlassian, so this is Benjamin. Benjamin started, I don't know, February last year. I'm not sure. So he actually started and how do I know Benjamin?

He's he's he's a developer from from from San Francisco. So how do I know how do I know Benjamin? Well, Atlassian, everybody have to have to write an introductory blog post. So they entered in the first this is actually a task they have to do in the first week. They introduce themselves to the company. So, hi, I'm Benjamin.

Good day. And this is my these are my hobbies. I'm playing guitar. So so you get some personal stuff connected to Benjamin and then you can actually jump in and make a discussion. So say, for example, if he says, OK, I'm playing football and say, OK, let's play football together in on Friday.

Let's do that. It's great because actually we're sharing so much at Atlassian. We're sharing our wins, our fails, our news and and our questions that we have. So, for example, our wins, we're blogging about that here. Our design team won the design award. Great. Then our fails.

Well, we were doing this user groups, Atlassian user groups, and they did one in Sydney and this really sucked. So we we started a conversation here. So somebody blocked this and then we started a conversation. Trying to fix those fails, we're trying to fix those all together. Or if a new program comes up like like this, make a diff that I just showed you, we are we are we are announcing that also in our blog posts.

And then we have something where we can ask this cause confidence questions and where we can actually ask questions to the whole company. So Carrie Lou, he she asked here, how do you manage your personal tasks, emails and so on? So how do you do that? And then people can answer on that and we can start a discussion on that and we can learn from each other, actually.

Because there are some transparency enemies and look like this here, email. So many things are buried in emails, telephone. Nobody is listening. When you talk to another guy on the telephone, nobody can hear that. So this is really transparency animals and enemies.

And we actually want to connect the team. So we're using chat very, very heavily at Atlassian. So every team has their own chat room chatting about their stuff. And if someone is not available, he's work, maybe he's out for for a week or something or for a day. He can go back into the chat room because it's persistent and he can can look it up, can see what was the discussion, what was the team deciding on.

So everything is documented in our chat room and it really connects the whole company. So I can I can go in and connect myself to someone else in the company that I maybe don't know, someone from finance, just hip chat him.

So I can just write a chat message and transparency actually brings people together. And that's what we want. We want to bring people together. We don't want to work in silos. We want to bring people together. It helps bringing remote people together with office people. So I'm a remote guy. I work from from home all the time.

And this really connects me back to the office if I if I can block, if I can chat and this transparency brings also time zones together. So if we have a blog post and we start a discussion, for example, with these Atlassian user group that sucked, people in Australia can comment on that.

Then afterwards, people in Europe can comment on that, can can give their opinion, and then people in the States can comment on that. So we're really connecting connecting time zones with with with our collaboration platforms and with our chat and and being transparent around time zones. And then it's connecting people. So when I write a blog post as a coder, the CFO can comment on that, too.

Or I can comment on the CFO blog post, no problem. So it's bringing also hierarchies down, breaking hierarchies down because actually transparency that that spreads the culture around the company. Especially if you work in a distributed environment. So but telling all that sounds great, doesn't it?

Wow, there's also a dark side of transparency. And the first thing is it's information overload. This I mean, I told you were blogging about everything. But maybe there are 50 new blog posts every day at Atlassian.

This is really a lot. And you have to read through all of them. So it's you have to really adapt to that, that it's more like reading the newspaper. So if you don't know, not interesting in the sports part, you leave that out. So but but it can be really, really hard to get over this information overload. And then sometimes we have never ending discussions. I told you we are very, very passionate.

We want to really, really be be excellent in everything we do. And sometimes we are too passionate and we cannot stop our our discussions. So sometimes we have to say, OK, we take this offline, start a video call or whatever. So this is really saying. And if you have all this great transparency tools, it feels like you don't have to meet people in person.

But this is, of course, totally stupid. Of course, you have to meet people in person to make a personal relationship. But it feels like he's so close. If you just a chat message away, the people are so close. So this is this is also something that you have to learn. So how do we grow our culture and how do we grow our teams?

So as I said, we're twelve, twelve people around is a natural team size. Our teams are around six to eight people. That's our approximately our team size. If we talk about programming teams and of course, we have a big, big product and we have to scale that.

So we scale horizontally with that. So we have more of these these teams, six to eight people working on one product. And these these are autonomous. So maybe team A, they use tool X and the other team, they don't use a tool at all. So they are very, very autonomous. Maybe some people meet daily, some teams meet daily and other teams meet when it's necessary, depends on the team.

So every team can decide it for themselves. And this is actually autonomous autonomy for the team. And then, of course, we also have to work together. We're just not autonomous teams somewhere in the cloud. So we also have to have to support each other.

So if I need support, maybe I'm in the back end team and I have to need to need some support from the mobile team because I have done some new search algorithm. I want to reflect that also in the mobile app. I asked them, I just jump on on our chat room and then ask them, hey, can we get some support maybe this week, maybe next week?

And maybe they say yes, but maybe they say also, no, we have other priorities. We don't have time for that. So then it's actually, it's okay for us to change stuff in the mobile app. So even though they own the mobile app, there's no ownership. Everybody can change everything. We trust each other that we're doing excellent work.

So that's what we do. And this really scales. We can add more teams when the product grows, we can add more teams to that. And culture grows actually with the size of your company. So if you hire new people, I mean, we started 10 years ago with eight people, and now we are 800 people.

And it's not the same culture anymore, I can tell you that. The culture changes a little bit. We're trying to keep the core of our culture, but with more people, the culture changes a little bit. But how do you make sure that new people fit into your culture?

The first advice when you hire people is be picky. Inspect your candidates very, very carefully. Do they fit really? Is it really a fit? So we are doing 10 interviews with them or something like that. So if we think programming good, experience good, passion good, and then we're doing something we call the beer test.

So we're not drinking beer with all of these people, all of these new people, we're not doing that. But we think ourselves, so we imagine ourselves drinking beer with this guy or this girl on a Friday evening. If we want to go out, have a chat with them, does that feel comfortable? And they can be great programmers with great experience, but really, really assholes.

So if they fail the beer test, we say no, we don't hire those guys, or those girls. On the other hand, if they pass the beer test and lack experience, yeah, we can give them experience of programming languages or something like this.

So we hire those guys. So that's very important for us to hire for cultural fit. But be aware of the programmer effect. Yeah, that not all of you are the cool guys and all of you are the same. The culture lives from diversity.

So we actually, you also should hire for diverse culture, even though the people pass the beer test, but they are totally differently, you should hire them. And in technology, I must say, I've worked in some software companies, we are lacking women, really. So we really want to have more women in technology, please, please, please.

But said all that, it's hard to get into the strong culture. So we have a very, very strong culture, it's very, very passionate people. And once actually I started at Atlassian, I was afraid writing a blog post, because it's all the smart people at Atlassian. And I'm just the poor guy from Germany coming into this Australian company.

I was really, really afraid. So it's really hard to get into a strong culture. So what we're doing is actually we give every new employee a buddy. So everybody gets a buddy on. So this is the guy who's a little bit longer in the company, he knows a little bit more about the company. And they actually, they go to lunch together, maybe they go on a Friday pub evening together.

And if I as a new employee have a question, I ask my buddy, I'm comfortable with my buddy. So in this way, I'm dragged into the culture. Another thing that they're doing in the San Francisco office, they're doing the beer bike.

So every new employee on a Friday afternoon, they have this bike, and they drive around on this bike with beer in the back and going and driving around and giving people beer and have a chat with them. So this is also a great thing to bring people into culture. But said that, this is the Atlassian culture.

As I said, we are very, very happy. We want to have a happiness in our culture. We want to trust, we trust each other, we have respect for each other. We continuously improve our, what we do, we can continuously ask ourselves, can we do better here? So we want to continuously improve ourselves. We want to innovate, we will have innovation and autonomy.

So people are autonomous. But said that, this is the Atlassian culture. So what's important for your culture? I cannot tell you, you have to figure out what's important for your culture. So, said that is, if you know that, PING, great thing, Steve Jobs said, this is the next big thing, a social network for music, great.

But where's PING today? It's gone. They stopped it because actually products come and go. So new products come, old products go. We care in companies so much about our products.

Day in, day out. But maybe, maybe tomorrow there comes a new, new software out from Chinese programmers that kills our product from Atlassian. But you know what? We have a great culture because products come and go, but culture stays. It's the people.

This is very, very important. Thank you very much. Thanks for your attention. Thank you, Swin. Thank you, Swin.