How to Foster a Workplace Culture that Optimizes Developer Productivity

Businesses can recruit the most technically competent developers in the world, but to maximize productivity, businesses need more than expertise. Businesses also need a collaborative, affirming workplace where developers can thrive. A recent survey from Eagle Hill Consulting found that 72% of U.S. workers say workplace culture is the dominant factor driving their productivity and efficiency. When developers work in a positive environment that encourages them to collaborate and that values their work, developers feel motivated, connected, and engaged. They not only take pride in the technical products they work on but also take ownership of the business’s overall strategy and goals.

Fostering a workplace culture where developers thrive starts at the top. Leadership needs to communicate what the organization is working toward, and continuously reinforce goals and priorities. Leadership also needs to invest resources into ensuring that teams across the organization – not just DevOps – are collaborating, experimenting, breaking down silos, taking shared ownership of responsibilities and risks, holding postmortems to identify problems, and exploring better ways of working without assigning blame. Let’s explore four specific investments that businesses should be making to foster a workplace culture that optimizes developer productivity:

1. Empower developers to appreciate the higher-level purpose of their work: Most development teams don’t build entire platforms and systems; they work on narrow, incremental elements of these systems. Consequently, their knowledge tends to be a mile deep but only an inch wide. They often lack awareness of the broader context of their projects and don’t relate to the organization’s big-picture strategy that underlies their work. The best way for businesses to engage developers in this regard is to foster a workplace culture that empowers developers to appreciate the higher-level purpose of their work. Developers need to be continuously reminded that their work is connected to organizational goals and priorities. Moreover, developers need training in the systems they work on, and ongoing education on key topics like agile and DevSecOps.
2. Cultivate a product-focused mindset: With a traditional project management mindset, developers’ focus is on delivering a finished product on time and under budget. They aren’t encouraged to think outside the box about how to optimize a product to resonate optimally with customers, especially if these ideas may lead to scope creep that drives up costs and time. That’s why businesses should instead be cultivating a workplace culture that prioritizes a product-focused mindset. With a product-focused mindset, developers are empowered to make strategic decisions that shape the product’s design, code, and functionality. In the process, they take ownership of what they’re creating and let their creativity and ingenuity guide the directions they take. The end result is the business gets products that customers love, even if the timeline or budget needs to be adjusted to compensate.
3. Establish meaningful metrics aligned to business goals: Like any business unit, developers focus on meeting the performance metrics that are set out in front of them. That’s why establishing meaningful metrics is such an important part of building a workplace culture that optimizes developer productivity. Unfortunately, many organizations struggle to set appropriate metrics because they don’t have a solid enough understanding of the relationship between what developers do and what the business is working toward. The key is to identify metrics that will encourage developers to focus on activities and areas that advance top-priority business goals. Instead of a metric that tracks the percent of sprints that are completed on time, for example, the business might choose a metric that looks at the portion of all sprints that result in code that gets incorporated into a final product.
4. Invest in improving continuous delivery: Left to their own devices, developers would ask for weeks or months to complete a project. But marketplace pressures no longer allow for such lengthy timelines. Developers need to be able to constantly produce high-value, reliable code in short cycles that can be released at any time. This approach is known as continuous delivery. Because continuous delivery is not something developers gravitate to on their own, businesses need to ingrain it into workplace culture. They need to offer training in what continuous delivery looks like, as well as why a continuous delivery model is so important to the organization. And they need leadership that knows how to support their team and provide the necessary infrastructure and resources.

Developers succeed when their organization sets them up for success. To foster a workplace culture that optimizes developer productivity, businesses should be empowering developers to recognize the higher-level purpose of their work, cultivating a product-focused mindset, establishing meaningful performance metrics that are aligned with the business’s goals and priorities, and teaching developers how to adopt a continuous delivery model.

To learn more about best practices for optimally supporting and empowering developers, please check out Ippon’s latest eBook, “The Secret to Boosting DevSecOps and Developer Productivity.”