As a company dedicated to building products designed to evolve alongside businesses, Focused Labs is no stranger to transformation. However, the challenges of an expanding headcount and acclimatizing the entire company to the remote-work era requires applying the company’s growth mindset to other aspects of the organization.
According to Focused Labs Director of Talent Katy Scott, the company has just over half its team located in Chicago, with the rest working remotely across the country. Due to this hybrid working model, it’s become increasingly important to make sure all employees feel connected to their coworkers. As the company continues pursuing more intentional remote-work practices, the team is trained on cultivating an inclusive culture defined by community and continual learning — one in which all employees, whether they’re remote or in the office, can participate in.
Scott said the team’s approach to inclusion is reflected in their current cultural efforts, such as having more frequent discussions around psychological safety, which involves making team members feel secure speaking up without fear of retribution. In her mind, empowering employees to take part in more open conversations and expand their knowledge together is tantamount to fostering a more inclusive work environment.
“When we give our employees time and space to talk about concepts together, it sparks interest and excitement in how we build a better place to work,” Scott said.
Yet encouraging open dialogue is far from the only way Focused Labs is building a sense of belonging in the workplace. Built In Chicago caught up with Scott to learn how the company is creating a culture built upon community and continual learning.
Tell me more about Focused Labs’ approach to employee engagement. What steps do leaders take to bring the company’s people together?
Right now, we’re particularly mindful of our hybrid workforce. We’ve read up on best practices for distributed remote teams and established intentional routines, such as daily team sync-ups. Our leaders always join, giving everyone the chance to talk to them directly. These sync-ups help us get to know each other better and understand what’s happening day to day.
In addition to team sync-ups, we have a number of ways employees can interact with each other. For instance, every employee is paired up randomly for weekly chats, which gives everyone the opportunity to get to know each person at the company. We also have monthly small group lunches with a focus on chats unrelated to work, a variety of Slack channels with discussion-focused topics, and an editorial committee that provides feedback and edits our company blogs. Lastly, we have an engineering leadership team passionate about and focused on teaching best practices regarding extreme programming. These groups are open to anyone, and we encourage everyone to join groups that interest them. By encouraging employees to interact with each other frequently outside of their day-to-day work, we hope to build a culture of trust in which everyone feels comfortable.
PASSION AND CURIOSITY ABOUND
What types of cultural initiatives can employees take part in that foster inclusion?
Every week, we host a variety of different talks open to everyone. These talks allow us to gather feedback in real time and ensure all of our practices are beneficial. While some of them are more actionable than others, our goal for each of them is to encourage participation from everyone on the team.
Additionally, we’re continuing to build on discussions around psychological safety with future training on how to identify unsafe team behaviors and strategies in order to improve team trust.
How does the company set aside time and space for employees to be creative and curious?
We have “focused hours” where every two weeks employees can take up to a half day to focus on anything they’re interested in or passionate about. We also have multiple weekly lunch talks for employees to connect through book clubs or talks about software development practices and design. This month, we’re hosting our first on-site team gathering in Chicago, during which time we’ll participate in a number of talks and exercises, giving engineers the chance to pair up on different projects and gain exposure to new tech stacks.
THE AIM TO EVOLVE
What steps is the company taking to make employees feel comfortable collaborating both with each other and with clients?
We’re diving into specific strategies to build psychological safety within our teams. We recently introduced these concepts to our teams and discussed examples of psychological safety. By dedicating time to discussing this topic, we’re helping our teams become more adept at recognizing when teams are psychologically unsafe while providing them with the tools and foresight they need to acknowledge and build psychological safety.
We also work closely with our clients’ teams. This means that, while we often work together, we’re frequently working collaboratively with other ever-changing teams. That’s partly why we see huge value in educating our teams on how to work well together, as it improves our ability to work collaboratively with people of all backgrounds.
I feel so fortunate to be surrounded by a team that really loves their work and is constantly aiming to improve.”
How have you seen employees benefit from Focused Labs’ culture of inclusion and learning?
When we give our employees time and space to talk about concepts together, it sparks interest and excitement in how we build a better place to work. It can be easy to spend all your time and energy on day-to-day projects, which prompts entire teams to lose sight of how to really work together. I love being able to share best practices in this space, because it helps everyone understand how their individual actions contribute to the ways in which people treat each other and show up every day.
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