When you’re spending 40 hours a week at work, you want that time to be as enjoyable as possible, and that’s where company culture comes in. The more positive you can make your culture, the more your employees will want to stick around and invest in your company’s mission.

I look at company culture as something that happens organically. It’s not necessarily about creating a culture, but rather creating the room for culture to create itself. Most importantly, that means finding the right people. You need employees who are going to buy in wholeheartedly to your vision and contribute to something larger than themselves.

When I first came onboard at Celero, I was looking forward to the challenge of creating a company culture from scratch. Being a new organization, and especially one that has been formed with various disparate groups through acquisitions, creating a sense of culture is much harder. In some ways, you’re adopting culture; in other ways, you’re refreshing it or creating a new one. I’ve gotten the chance to watch as different groups have come together to navigate new waters.

I gravitated toward those challenges because I knew they would also bring a tremendous amount of opportunity. Work is a huge aspect of life, and the more you can make work be a parallel stream to the life you want to live, the better. I saw the opportunity to create that environment for myself and my team at Celero, and I couldn’t pass it up.

As I settled in and started to build the team I have today, culture was one of my top priorities. I asked myself, how can we build a culture that we all want to be a part of and contribute to? How can we avoid having one voice be the loudest voice in the room?

For my team, a highly collaborative culture is what works best. We do our best work in a climate of open and honest communication. But I believe that what works for us probably wouldn’t work as well for any other group, because it wouldn’t be genuine. In order to create a genuine culture, you have to factor in the individuals on your team. I think that’s what culture ultimately means: it’s the group of people you have at the moment, and whatever values they buy into.

When a person starts volunteering, they quickly find out how much their community needs them, and how valuable their special skills are to those in need. 

What Is Hour of Code?

After participating in an Hour of Code event where I taught a group of students about computer coding, my interest in community service was sparked. If you’re not familiar with this organization, Hour of Code helps educators and other professionals across the world host computer science classes. Their mission is to make coding approachable, and encourage young people from all walks of life to pursue a fulfilling career in technology. Their free tutorials make arranging a session easy, even for those of us who aren’t well-versed in hosting events. Since their inception in 2013, they’ve served nearly 1.2 million people across more than 180 countries. 

Taking a Different Approach 

I’ve always prided myself on being someone who likes to problem-solve and tinker with things to gain an understanding of its inner workings. When brainstorming ideas for my event, my thinking was that I should find a way to demystify what’s inside a computer and how it works. My wife is a former 5th grade teacher, so I was lucky enough to be able to work with a group of students from the school she used to work. 

I opted to take a unique approach to introducing coding to students. Hour of Code primarily focuses on teaching others how to write code, but I wanted to help people actually feel the technology. When a student takes a coding class, they can usually grasp the way that code structures work, but the technology is still mysterious and difficult to grasp. Instead of bringing in computers and having everyone go through basic exercises, I went lo-fi and physically walked the students through a demonstration. 

I instructed the students that we were going to pretend to be a computer, and we would run a set of instructions to see what would happen. The goal was to show them how instructions are sent to a computer and how they’re interpreted if they’re not clear. As the exercise progressed, the students would see what happens to the computer, and if there are any bugs in the instructions. After encountering a bug, the group would identify the bug and think of ways to resolve the problem. 

The Future of Technology 

This techless approach to teaching code helped to break down the wall between complicated technological concepts and young students. My hope is that more people will realize how rewarding a career in technology can be, and how achievable it is if you have an appreciation for learning. 

Building a development team from scratch during the height of the COVID-19 crisis was definitely an interesting experience. It forced me to take a different approach to hiring and teambuilding, one where all I had to go on was experience and intuition. Still, you can tell a lot about a person through virtual conversations over coffee—and today, it’s hard to imagine Celero without my team.

For me, those hiring conversations were not only about finding people who had the professional experience I needed, but also getting a feel for who the candidates were as people. What were they looking for? What would fulfill and encourage them professionally? How would they deal with the challenges that we would inevitably face during such a tough time? If you look at my team today, half of them were brought on purely through these virtual interviews.

Empowering Honest Conversations

What made this hiring process so productive, despite the constraints we were up against, was transparency and vulnerability. I made it a point to be upfront since I myself was coming from a vulnerable place, having just left a job that I loved for ten years in the middle of a global pandemic to start at Celero. I explained my reasons for making the switch—how working at Celero was an opportunity for all of us to grow, innovate, push ourselves, and create something new together. Empowering a deeply honest conversation allowed me to get a feel for what the candidates were looking for themselves, and how equipped they would be to weather challenging times.

Eventually, I found my dream team, and they’ve managed to exceed my wildest expectations of a mid-pandemic, virtually-assembled team. They’re all so different, but they fit together perfectly like different pieces of a puzzle. Some are energetic and outgoing; others are introverted and analytical; and still others are mathematical and data-driven. All contribute to a larger mosaic that we’re building, and all came to Celero through candid, transparent conversations.

Welcoming Different Perspectives

I recently read something about diversity that resonated with me (even if it is an oversimplification): If you’re always eating hamburgers and fries, you’re missing out on a whole part of the world’s cuisine. But the more diverse your menu is, the more wonderful things you get to experience—and on top of that, you create fusions of different cultures. This struck me because of the diversity among my team members, where each person brings a fresh, new perspective to our work. Having a variety of perspectives is important because it informs the larger aspect of what we’re building, how we’re growing, and what we need to do in the future.

So, what are my best tips for building a professional team in the midst of a worldwide crisis? Be open, honest, and transparent. Encourage candid conversations. Seek a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. Most of all, look for people who can grow with your company through times of hardship, because it’s through hardship that some of the most innovative ideas are created.

As the Director of Engineering for Celero Commerce, my role is to develop technology that not only solves a problem but also wows the user. Today, I’m sharing the process that my team utilizes for developing solutions that help small to mid-sized businesses thrive. 

Ask the Right Questions 

At the start of a project, it can be tempting to jump in and hit the ground running. However, this rushed approach will more than likely lead to the development of a product that fails to solve the issue at hand. When trying to build the right solution, the first step is to clarify a few key details:  who will be using the technology, how they’ll be using it, and what they’re trying to accomplish. By focusing on the end-user and exactly how they’ll be interacting with the technology, it helps to guide the development process in the right direction. Every action taken should be done with the end-user in mind. 

Direct Communication 

Directly contacting the end-user and interviewing them about their unique needs is the most effective route for answering these important questions. However, if this isn’t doable, the next best option is to speak with the business we’re assisting in creating this solution. While speaking directly to the end-user is ideal, the business should also have a good understanding of what their customers are looking for and which features are most important to them. 

Walk a Mile in Their Shoes 

Once these research questions are answered, the next step will be to put ourselves in the shoes of the customer. For example, if we’re working on developing a product for customers who are interacting with field service workers, it’s vital for us to understand the stress that they’re experiencing and how they might be feeling. Take this example from our ongoing development of RazorSync, an award-winning software suite aimed at a constellation of field services businesses. Dealing with home repairs is never fun, so the last thing customers they’ll want to do is wrestle with a non-user-friendly application that seems to compound their problems.

Make the Customer Smile 

It’s our job to develop a product that’s easy-to-use, intuitive, and effective in solving a frustrated customer’s issue. Focusing on the emotions that the end-user will be feeling at the time they’re using the product will help to guide the development process, and create something that will turn a terrible situation into a stress-free experience. At the end of the day, if we can wow these customers, we don’t even need to worry about wowing our own. If the end-user is happy, that’s going to directly benefit our merchant clients and help to grow their businesses. 

Learn More

At Celero Commerce, we pride ourselves on creating solutions that deliver on all fronts. If your business has a problem you need help solving, make sure to reach out to us. The primary goal of our organization is to develop solutions that help small businesses succeed. 

Innovation doesn’t happen out of thin air; it happens when smart people are given the freedom to experiment and be creative. But in order to get that freedom—and the innovation that is borne from it—you need leaders that trust you. That’s why one of the hallmarks of our company here at Celero is trust, and specifically trust with verification.

Trust with verification means that we trust our employees to do their best work on their own, so we give them plenty of room to be creative, innovative, and experimental. The only thing we ask in return is that they verify their work. That doesn’t mean micromanaging, but rather giving people the opportunity to justify their reasoning and decisions. While innovation comes about through freedom, it must still have a direction—a method to the madness, so to speak. At Celero, if you can provide that verification and sense of direction, you’re given all the space you need to experiment.

Positive Feedback Loops

In creating a workplace built on trust and freedom, our goal is to create positive and productive feedback loops: we want our employees asking questions like, where did this idea work and where did it fail? How can we refine and improve upon it for next time? 

This kind of creative process is important in any organization, and particularly in smaller companies and startups. With so many possibilities and so much to be done, focusing everyone on one strict path can be detrimental to innovation. When everyone is swimming in the same small lane, there’s so much that can be missed. We want our employees to instead have a highly open perspective on what can be done. We want them to collaborate, to leverage the experience of others in the organization, and to repurpose knowledge across multiple areas. It’s that central aspect of trust that creates so many important byproducts: openness, honesty, collaboration, constructive criticism, and teamwork.

Trust and Accountability

As I’ve gone about building my team, I’ve made it a point to lead with trust. I can’t always be there for my employees, especially with COVID-19 keeping us from working together in person, so I’ve had no choice but to rely on trust. Since I assembled my team during the pandemic, they’ve never even met each other in person—and yet, we work together effectively. If someone says they’re working on a task, you can trust that person to get it done when they say they’ll get it done. If someone says they’ll get back to you with whatever you need, you know they will. 

That trust helps to create a culture of accountability that everyone wants to buy into. It’s a more open and transparent way of working, where people have the space they need to do their best work without feeling like they have to conform to one linear path. The key component of our success as a team? Trust with verification.