Building Company Culture

About this Episode

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, host Mike opens with a gardening metaphor to frame the episode’s central theme: cultivating healthy company culture. Drawing from his personal experience transforming barren soil into fertile ground, Mike contrasts short-term fixes like chemical fertilizers with long-term strategies like feeding the soil itself—likening these to how companies often rely on perks or high salaries to attract talent rather than investing in sustainable, growth-focused environments. This sets the stage for a broader conversation about what truly nourishes both plants and people—ecosystems, relationships, and meaningful investment.

The discussion evolves into a rich conversation among remote team members, including Justin, Javier, Jorge, and Will, who share their experiences working in international and distributed environments. They highlight the importance of communication, inclusive documentation, and feeling culturally and professionally supported. Javier and Jorge reflect on challenges faced by Latin American contractors, including language barriers and differing communication styles. They emphasize that well-documented processes and clear expectations can bridge time zones and cultural gaps, especially when employees are empowered to grow and contribute meaningfully.

The group critiques superficial attempts at building culture, such as gift cards and perks, and stresses the importance of leadership that fosters personal growth, purpose, and strong communication. Leaders who spend time mentoring, understanding their teams, and clearing barriers can create “fertile soil” where people thrive. Whether it’s through offering growth opportunities, creating psychological safety, or enabling people to do impactful work, the team agrees: you can’t shortcut your way to a strong company culture. You have to invest in it intentionally, consistently, and with heart.

Transcript:

MIKE: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I am Mike, and I am hosting again today. With me today I have Justin and Javier. And this should provide some good perspectives. Justin previously worked for Acima [laughter] [inaudible 00:39] and is now elsewhere; I'll leave unnamed [laughs]. Javier is a contractor that works outside the office, outside the country, which will provide some good perspective because we'll get good perspective to the topic today. I'm going to announce the topic in a minute [laughter]. Although you could probably see it from the title of the podcast recording but, you know, at least I'll pretend to leave some suspense there [laughs].

JUSTIN: I'm looking for a good story, Mike [laughter].

MIKE: I'm going to talk about my garden.

JUSTIN: Oh.

MIKE: I've enjoyed gardening since I was a kid. I like growing things. I like being outside. I do have a garden. To be honest, it's maybe a little neglected as of late, but [chuckles] I do have a garden. And I say neglected, I've let some things grow and spread. So, I've got a big patch of raspberries, for example, because I love raspberries. What's wrong with letting the raspberries spread [chuckles]? They're delicious. I've got quite a bit of garlic, and I've got some other berries. I’ve got some goji berries, some garlic chives. So things that have kind of spread some, but I like them, so it works great. And I have a lot of kale because I love kale. I eat kale every day.

I've read a lot about gardening. I, at one point, considered changing careers. I was going to work for a gardening company on their tech side for a while. I didn't end up doing that, but strongly considered it. And my original major was botany, so definitely very interested in this topic. I've got, like, a hundred cactus plants in my office that I love. Most of them I grew from seed [laughs]. I like plants. Pandemic, you know [laughter].

So, I'm going to talk about a thing that people regularly get wrong, and even to the point of agriculture sometimes gets wrong, and they're turning from this. And there's been a turn over the last few decades to fundamentally shift the way people think about not just gardening but farming. Where I live, I have quite a bit of farms nearby. In the state of Illinois, there's a lot of corn and soybeans. If you've ever been there, you know what I'm talking about [laughs]. There's a lot of corn and a lot of soybeans.

They used to just plow everything under every year or just treat the waste from the previous year's corn and soybeans as waste, and just kind of ignore it, let it blow away. And when they’d till it under in the fall, the soil would blow away all winter. And there's places you can go and they'll show you how deep the topsoil used to be and how deep it is now [laughs]. On the rest stops on the side of the road, they'll show you how much topsoil has been lost because it's a big deal, like, half or more of the topsoil has been lost in areas. And it's a really serious problem because now you can't grow crops as well because you've lost that deep reservoir of fertility that allows you to grow.

And so, they've got techniques they do in farms. One of them is that they’re moving away from tilling. They allow the stubble to stay on the ground so the soil doesn't blow away. But it also means that it decomposes into the soil. And there's a reason they have corn and soybeans also. Because soybeans are legumes, they've got nodules on their roots that feed microbes, that take nitrogen out of the air and make it into a form that the plants can use. So not only are soybeans high in protein and nutritious, they also leave the soil better than before you planted them. So, they improve the soil.

So, it's part of a rotation where they grow the soybeans to improve the soil. Then they grow the corn, which is really hungry and uses up all that nitrogen. And then, they'll grow soybeans again to improve the soil again. So, there is this cycle of rotation, which is something that was done years in the past. People have done crop rotation for probably a millennia, realizing that certain plants will take certain nutrients from the soil. This is getting to engineering, by the way. This is getting to engineering [laughter].

JUSTIN: I'm getting a minor in botany right now.

[laughter]

MIKE: In my garden, so my garden, when I moved into where I'm at now, I took the worst soil in the yard, along the back of the property. And they’d cut away the topsoil [chuckles] when they built the house, and it left just subsoil. And it's just...it's clay, and sand, and gravel, and really nothing else [laughs]. And I thought, this is a project. I want to see if I can make this grow stuff. And I guess the previous owner of my place was a grass seed salesman. He couldn't get grass to grow [laughter]. It was just bare dirt on the area where my garden is now, and there was ravines all over through it. Cutting down, you know, it was bad.

And so, to the key point, what a lot of people do is they'll go buy some chemical fertilizers, and they'll throw that on the soil, and the plants can actually grow in that. You know, you can get some things to grow. In the extreme case, you can do, like, hydroponics, and you can actually kind of make it work with just chemicals [laughs]. It's a fussy business. And the minute that you stop augmenting with those chemicals, the whole thing falls apart, right? And everything dies [laughs]. You need to continuously add those chemicals in order to make it work.

And they actually degrade the soil over time because they usually come with some salts that will build up in the soil. So, you'll get these minerals that build up and actually make it harder and harder to grow things. It's a problem. It's a real problem. And it reflects a misconception as to what you're doing there in the garden. Because I have a garden...it's a small scale. I can really focus on that. And the change in mindset that makes all the difference is you don't feed the plants. You feed the soil. You don't feed the plants. You feed the soil. If you feed the soil...so, think about the difference that would make. So, I'm going to focus on improving the soil.

Going back to those farmers who have lost all the topsoil, like, oh, wait, we need to stop this, right? I need to preserve the soil I have and improve it. In some places, they actually are improving the soil. They're growing it again. If you feed the soil, then the healthy plants will follow because the plants don't live in a desert, in a vacuum. We're not on a space station. Even if we were on a space station, plants have not evolved to live in a sterile environment, and don't live well in a sterile environment.

You may remember the book and movie The Martian that came out a few years ago [chuckles]. A guy had to poop in his garden in order to get microbes to grow because the plants wouldn't grow without it. It’s the same idea. You need to have this ecosystem, or the plants just don't do right. And if you build healthy soil by feeding all of the stuff that's living in the soil...because it's not just the plants. There is a huge network of fungi, bacteria, protozoans, insects [laughter], rodents. There are all kinds of things that live in that soil. And your plants are just one of them.

If you have incredibly healthy soil, by adding things to feed the soil, feed that whole ecosystem, then the healthy plants will follow because you're focusing on the right thing. You're building the healthy ecosystem, the healthy environment, and then the plants will grow well as a natural consequence because they'll be in a place they want to live. All of the things that would be good for them are there. And so, you don't have to go and find all of those precise chemicals. Oh, I need this much nitrogen. I need this much phosphorus. I need trace amounts of copper, whatever the case may be. You don't have to worry about that because everything else is taken care of. That will just naturally be taken care of because everything else is so healthy.

And you might have to worry about weeds [laughter] because they'll grow abundantly in your garden as well, but that's a problem you like to have. You want to have a garden where you can actually have things grow. You can actually solve weeds the same way. We actually want to diverge. You feed the soil on top of the ground where you don't have the plants you want, and then the weeds cannot grow there. If you put a lot of mulch there, then it will gradually break down, become good soil, also smothering weeds.

Which was a long introduction [laughter], but I think it's hugely relevant here because we're going to talk about company culture and how you build it. And talking about this garden shows some of the ways you can do it wrong [laughs], as well as the ways that you can do it right. There's a lot of ways that you can kind of fake it. You can add those chemical additives, and you can pay really high salaries, for example. And yeah, you'll get a certain sort of mercenary person who wants to go for the high salary. But it doesn't really build a healthy culture a long time.

Not that it's bad to pay people a decent amount, don't get me wrong [laughs]. But you can't solve some problems with money. If people hate being there, really, there's not enough money you can pay. There's an example of this that's been in the news somewhat of late. I guess Facebook has publicly somewhat denied it, but there's been news reports that they are offering seven-figure salaries to AI researchers if they'll switch over to Facebook. You start adding up those zeros, and that's annually, right? That is huge amounts of money. And I think they've got, like, one [laughs] new researcher that's --

JUSTIN: I think there were a couple that came over, but yeah, it just goes to show that, I don't know, they may be focusing on the wrong thing.

JAVIER: I just wanted to share an experience because, previously to Acima, actually, I was working in a company earning probably 30% or 40% more than now. I really hated my job.

JUSTIN: Oooh.

JAVIER: Yeah. So, definitely, you know, money is good, and I do have money. It's good for me and my family. But the culture sometimes, you know, the way you feel doing your job can be definitely different, even with good money. So, I’m completely agreeing with you.

JUSTIN: Yeah. And if you somehow get that combination of good money and good culture, I mean, you get people who are willing to go the extra mile for the company, and that is fertile ground for explosive growth. Going back to that garden thing, you know, you look at what you reap from a really, really fertile garden. It may take a season, but you're going to get two, three, four times what other people are getting because you spent the time to prepare that ground. And not only that, but it's like, you'll be spending less time weeding. You'll be spending, you know, all your focus will be on growth or productivity. So, that is, like, the ideal.

And so, I've been in a couple of places that have been good, and I've been in a couple of places that have, basically, it seemed like they were salting the earth [laughter], and people were leaving left and right. So, it's like, wow, what a great analogy you have here, Mike. But you look at it and you're like, it's not something that just happens. If you keep on going back to the analogy, the gardener or the farmer, the person in charge there of the soil, they are spending time preparing that soil. And they are just, like, you know, doing everything that they can to prepare it. Because it's like, they aren't the ones that are necessarily producing the thing. They're preparing the soil such that the thing could be produced.

MIKE: You hit on a key point there. They're not producing it [chuckles]. They are building that environment so that the production will happen on its own. And I think that distinction is so important [chuckles] and really easy to miss with short-term thinking.

JUSTIN: Yeah. And this is funny because I'm always torn about the huge amounts of salary that CEOs get paid. And you look at that and you're like, how could that guy, usually guy, how could that person be worth that much money? And you realize that sometimes they aren't, obviously. Sometimes those are massive failures. But sometimes they are amazing at farming.

MIKE: Yes [chuckles].

JUSTIN: They're growing people. They're growing a company. And they have the right ideas to prepare that soil such that that company can be very successful. And I can think of a couple of places that I've worked that have gone through a couple of different CEOs. I think it's been long enough now, but I specifically worked at SoFi. And they started out with a decent, I mean, they recognized that, but they had kind of bad leadership at the top.

And then, the person that came in as current CEO, whose name is Noto, who I really respect still, he came in, and he has created a culture that even though I don't work there anymore, I recognize that, hey, that was an amazing culture that fixed a lot of the problems that the previous one had, the previous CEO had, and he did it from the top. And he came out and figured out all the intermediate leadership. And to the point where it's now, I still have friends that work there, and they are very happy with the way things are going. And so, it's just like, I look at that and I'm like, that is an example of a great leader who recognizes how to grow a company and the people.

MIKE: Well, let's talk a little bit about what might be some of these chemical additives [laughter] they might use to cope for a little bit, but don't really have long-term success, and then what actually matters.

A lot of years ago, I used to have a job where I'd take the same bus to work every day, and I got to be kind of friends with the bus driver, who was also a university professor. That's the problem with adjunct professors [laughter], is that they have to go drive a bus to actually make the money. That's a topic for a different day, but there's some challenges in academia.

So, he was a university professor who also drove a bus, and he talked a lot about the incentives that companies will give to try to get their employees to do something, like, they'll give out, like, here's a $50 gift card, to give an example of that. And a lot of companies will turn to something like that, to, like, oh, we need to improve our culture, so we'll give people lots of these little gifts. He was not a fan, I'll say [laughter], because he said, “You know, people can look...” So, he was thinking of somebody who wasn't getting paid enough at his job, so he had to go get a second job. He says, “You know, people can look and see, you know, I'm getting this $50 gift card. It's maybe nice today, but it's not feeding my family [laughter]. It's pretty superficial.”

Not that it couldn't be a little nice to do now and again, but if your entire plan for helping your team be happy is to give them a gift card once a year, you're probably not going to be very successful, especially, I'll say, if you're working with a distributed team where you've got contractors all over the world, you know, where a lot of times contractors aren't getting that, right, you're not going to build a company culture off of handing out those little gifts. It's an utterly inadequate strategy.

JUSTIN: I do have to say, I knew of a company that took that to the extreme. They handed out those all the time, and that was the culture [laughter].

MIKE: Oh.

JUSTIN: And so, every time he saw somebody, he was like, “Here, here you go.”

You remember Overstock? That went through a lot of different phases, right, growth and shrink. Well, actually, you probably aren't as aware with, you know, where you're living right now. But here in Utah, overstock.com had a very interesting CEO who had phases where he would grow the company a lot, and then it seemed like there was a great culture. And then, something would break culturally, usually the CEO, and then they’d go through a bunch of shrinkage.

And it got to the point where it was kind of a joke within software engineers in Utah because you all did your time at Overstock [laughter], you know, you'd go in...I interviewed there, and luckily, I declined their offer. But it was interesting because they went through phases where the culture was actually really good for software engineers. And they were well-compensated, and they were well-regarded within the company. And they were producing a lot of successful websites, and the company was growing, and things like that. And then, they went through periods of time where the budget got shrunk, and all the little perks that they had gotten used to got cut, and the pay got cut, and then they went through several rounds of layoffs.

And so, it's interesting because you have stuff that's external to the culture that gets cut, I mean, if the company goes bad and their budgets get cut, all of a sudden, those little perks that were part of the culture they go away. And you're left with, oh, why am I here if I'm not getting that $50 gift card, or if I'm not getting that great quarterly vacation to Las Vegas, or something like that? And people were looking at it like, you wonder if they ever got to the point where they were an actually good engineering organization, or was it that they just had a lot of neat perks [laughs]?

And so, the perks inspired a certain amount of loyalty for a certain amount of time, but it was, like, those specific chemicals that got added that...and when those chemicals got taken away, people didn't want to stay. And it went just beyond just, like, the cuts to the, you know, the layoffs. They had people actively leaving, you know, looking for other jobs because the company culture got toxic. And it was interesting. It was an interesting story. And yeah, I don't think I have any friends that work there anymore, and the company's gone through several reinventions. They're now known as Bed, Bath, & Beyond, actually.

MIKE: Heard that.

JUSTIN: But it's funny because the culture got so bad, and they got such a bad reputation that they actually had to rename the company so that people wouldn't associate it with them anymore. But yeah, a lot of my experience, obviously, has been with local culture, and, you know, we've been over some of the bad things that happen locally. How about you guys...can you guys talk a little bit about the bad things that may happen, you know, badly for remote? And then we'll get to the good stuff, right? So, that's the intent.

JAVIER: Well, you know, as remote developers, sometimes communication is a big deal. Well, for example, here in our team, something that is very important for us, I think, is that we are able to have a community of Latin people. Because, you know, Latin people is a bit more fun people. I don't know how to say it. Maybe Jorge has a better idea. But yeah, that is part of our challenge, is to have communication with, let's say, the other side. And when I say the other side, I mean no Latino people. Sometimes it's for culture, or whatever, it's difficult to have this communication, and that is difficult to handle. Yeah, that's my thoughts right now. I don't know, Jorge, if you have some opinions about this, or...

MIKE: By the way, Jorge has joined us. He joined us a little bit late [laughter].

JUSTIN: Jorge, where are you located at?

JORGE: I'm in Lima, Peru.

JUSTIN: Lima, Peru? Oh wow. I've never been. That sounds exotic and awesome.

JAVIER: You have to go, best food in the world, I think.

MIKE: Oh.

JUSTIN: Oh wow. Hey, I'm going to have to go now [laughter].

JORGE: Yeah, but if you come here, you're going to return to your country a little bit fat because here is, like [laughter], a lot of food, every day [laughter], every hour.

JUSTIN: Gotcha.

MIKE: Do you have any thoughts, Jorge, on what is critical for company culture? So, Javier said something interesting there. He said that not being, like, on an island, but having a group of people that you can identify with. And that can mean a lot of things, but maybe most importantly, it means that you're not alone, that you've got somebody else that you can pair with, that you can ask questions to, that you can feel like is a friend, seems like is pretty important.

JORGE: Yeah. In my experience, as Javier told us, communication is really important, and even not only communication but defined processes are too important. Why? Because, for example, sometimes we don't know about the best practices inside a company to fix a problem or an issue, for example, and that's a really good point. That's one of the reasons I love a lot of the process here in Acima because we have, like, a really big Confluence page [laughter]. We can find whatever we need inside of it, right? But that's a good practice that a lot of other companies don't do, right?

So, that's key in the company and in a good technical culture because if you need to do something, at least you can check your recommendations and try to fix something in a good way, in an expected way for maybe the teams, right? So, I think it's a really good, important part of our jobs to get that documentation as updated as we can, right? As we can. So, I think both of them, the communication and the processes, are the key in a remote culture and work.

MIKE: It’s interesting. You mentioned the documentation. Have something written down. Go ahead.

JAVIER: I have something to say about this because, again, as a Mexican, as a Latino...and I think this is many of us. I think many of us we think the same, because sometimes...of course, this is not offensive, not at all, but, you know, the American communication could be different if you compare it with Latino communication. And sometimes documents and documentation itself is prepared thinking in that culture, and it's perfectly okay.

Just for me at least, it sometimes could be difficult to understand the sense. Maybe I can understand the words in English, you know, but the sense, for example, you guys use a lot of acronyms [laughter], and Latino people make me crazy sometimes with acronyms [laughter]. And sometimes the descriptions are very small, and maybe Latino people need a bit more, you know, something a bit more [SP] más carne.

JUSTIN: Más carne. [laughter] Meaty --

JAVIER: Yeah [laughs], and sometimes that makes you feel a bit like I'm part of another subculture inside of the culture of the company, in this case, the companies from United States. At the same time, this subculture could mean you're in a different group, and that sometimes feels like you can, you know, be completely apart. Maybe I'm not expressing totally because my English is not so good, but yeah, hopefully, appreciate my thoughts.

JUSTIN: So, I have some thoughts on this. I've worked with contractors from Colombia, Medellín, and Argentina, and a couple of other places, and as well as with contractors from Eastern Europe and from India, and, hopefully, I'm getting a couple of contractors from India in the next month or so.

But you brought up some really good points there of, like, you know, making sure that you're included on the culture and that the documentation is really good. Because you can go read documentation, and if it's good, you don't have to, like, necessarily ask questions, and it conveys what the culture is. If the documentation is not good, oftentimes, you're kind of, like, left in the dark, and you're trying to communicate with people, and nobody will respond, and so on.

But if the documentation is good, it helps you understand, and it enables you to understand and fix the problems yourself. And also, if there's, like, a culture of fixing documentation, or adding to it, that is really key as well to, like, helping people not be frustrated. And this is something that I've noticed, is if you can enable people to be successful on their own through documentation, through clear processes—I like how you talked about that processes part—if you can, like, show how the processes work, and what the theory is behind them, and why they work the way that they do, as well as, like, have good documentation, you're enabling those other people to be successful. And you don't have to be there to, like, answer every question.

And it's especially important as you get, like, further time zones away, and you're not, like, overlapping. Because, you know, all of a sudden, if somebody offshore has a team, and they, like, have an eight-hour difference to you, they'll write their message. You'll get it first thing in the morning, but they'll already be asleep. And you'll reply, and all of a sudden, this task that, you know, in reality should have taken them a couple of hours at most, really ends up taking, like, a week or two or more.

And nobody likes to be unproductive. If you are being unproductive, generally, it's, like, you are unhappy, at least myself. And, all of a sudden, you start looking around, like, oh, this company is not utilizing my potential. I'm not growing here, and I'm just banging my head against the wall. And that'll enable you to go look for something better, and even that something better could be a pay cut. So, it's, you know, all those things. And I've rambled a little bit here, but yeah, those are some of the items I know.

MIKE: You touched on a couple of things that I wanted to bring up. You said that everybody wants a chance to grow, and everybody wants a chance to do something meaningful. And both of these go down to deep human need, right? We have [chuckles] our human nature in that we're not robots. We have things that we need, and one of those is to grow. It's just deeply wired in us. And, again, we want to do something meaningful.

If we're not growing and if we have no opportunity to do anything that feels like it really matters...you work on a project that seems trivial, and then it gets dropped. And then, you move on to something else [laughs], and that project gets dropped. And you never actually get anything up that actually accomplishes anything. You're not going to like that job. You're not going to like anything about it. You're going to feel like I just wasted however many years of my life doing something that didn't matter at all, and you leave.

Whereas if you feel like you participated in building something that mattered and you get to see that actually going and affecting your customers, making your customers' lives better, then you're invested. You care. And there's probably other things. But coming into our session today, the things that I thought were most important for culture are those opportunities for personal enrichment and fulfillment in our job.

I think there's also an aspect that Javier touched on, which is having people that you like working with, having those conversations, being able to interact with people and have positive interaction, feeling safe. We've talked a lot on this podcast before about psychological safety, feeling like you can be yourself, like you can be open and be respected; there's another key attribute as well. Those things trump just about anything. If I can go to a job where I am able to grow in my skills consistently, where the things that I do matter, why would I want to leave? It's giving me fulfillment in my life.

JUSTIN: And that pays you something so you can live, but yes.

MIKE: Yes. It is important to have enough money [laughter]. If you decide you're going to undercut all the competition on pay and pay less than everybody, it's probably not going to go well. You have to meet basic standards. But there's research that shows that once people reach the middle class, more money doesn't make that much difference, and this is outside of work, necessarily. But, you know, just in general, being super rich, there's a little bit of a bump as you get more money, but there's a lot of very unhappy rich people [chuckles].

But if you have enough, if you look around and you're more or less on par with other people, approximately equal, that's usually okay. It doesn't have to be the best pay in the industry, as long as it's not the worst. As long as you're making about what's normal for the industry, it's fine.

JORGE: I love to work with international teams. I started about six years ago trying to work with American companies and in international teams. And I love it because all of this stuff that currently we are talking about it's really awesome to know people from other countries. I only have the opportunity to go to Mexico City. I was living, like, four or five months in 2019, nothing else. But I need to visit a lot of other countries.

But I work with other teammates from a lot of other countries like here, for example, Colombian people, American people a lot, people from Europe, even from India. It's a very rich experience, at least for me, because I try to learn a lot from other developers and how they handle or how they solve a problem because they have other way to think and way to do the things, right? So, that's awesome. And, obviously, I'm taking advantage of improving my English skills every day [laughs]. So, it's really good, at least for my career, and I hope to still be getting close with all of these kinds of international teams. It's really good.

JUSTIN: So, I see Will joined. Hey, man. So, we got, like, three remote people. Will, are you also remote 100%?

WILL: Yep. It's been...

JUSTIN: Wow.

WILL: It's challenging, man. It's really, really tough. It's been frustrating. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure where the thread of the conversation has gone. I have personally been impacted a lot with the RTO mandates, and it's been challenging.

JUSTIN: So, I guess my question for you guys is, it's interesting because the company I work for went through a big, huge return to office and five days a week. If they don't have an RTO plan that is done well, you have high attrition. And it is interesting that that done well part...because I've worked in this industry for 20 years, right?

Before COVID, I was almost 100% in the office, and there were parts of the office that were annoying and parts that were fine. But the office, you know, when you're in the office, if you have good leadership and good recognition and you're working on good things and everything, and you have recognition and opportunities for growth, and your commute is not bad and things like that, there's a variety of things that make the office doable.

Like, a good example is today, I, you know, I camped out up in the mountains above here with my wife and one of my kids, and then I came down into the office at 8 o'clock. I had a shower, worked for four hours, and then I took a lunch break and did a workout for my lunch break, and then came back. And I'm, you know, working for another couple of hours. And it's not bad, but at the same time, I'm still working from home one or two days a week, and, for me, that's actually a good balance.

But every single person is different, and every single person has to make that decision for themselves, you know, what they're willing to do to return to office. But it has helped so much if the leadership makes that return to office palatable and, you know, enjoyable even. And they have the right incentives to go back to the office, and not just incentives, but, like, they have the right culture. So, otherwise, I forget what the attrition numbers are sometimes, but they are pretty high.

WILL: Yeah, like the big, long bus ride, like, heavy-duty commutes. A lot of people in big cities are doing serious, serious commutes, and that's a big...it's a big deal. I mean, like, two-hour commutes out on the West Coast is not unheard of, not unheard of, not crazy.

MIKE: Well, I think it's interesting. You talked about it as a perk, and we talked a lot about perks early on and how perks can keep you there for a while [chuckles]. But in the end, the things that matter the most are an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to do something that matters, and enough money. You have to have enough. You don't have to have the best in the industry, but you have to have enough.

So, as a leader, so I’m talking to any leaders who are listening [laughs], if you give the people you're working with an opportunity to grow their skills consistently, make time, schedule time. Say, “Take some time to grow your skills.” Give them projects specifically to give them a chance to grow their skills. Find out what they want to work on. Try to give them those opportunities.

Actively work with the people that you're working [chuckles] with and lead by giving them opportunities, clearing out the way, making their lives easier, and trying to give them an opportunity to grow. Also, give them opportunities to do something that matters. Don't stop somebody in a corner to work on a really long backlog of issues that nobody has reported in five years because it didn't really matter [laughter] that much. There may be some value. Most people probably aren't doing that.

But there's ways that we do that are less blatant than that, where you don't give somebody the support that they need. And you were talking about this before, I think it was you, Justin, talking about when they've got time differences, time zone differences. So, you don't give...the communication is so bad that nobody can actually get anything done because they don't know what it is they're supposed to be working on.

So, really address head-on some of the communication challenges that Will was talking about. You have to. And we've got people all over the world. We've got people here in multiple countries here in this call. If you don't do the work to try to make it easy to work with people who are doing the work...and most of the big companies, I think, are working with people not local.

Now, locally, you might have people in office, but you're going to work with people remote. And if you don't make that experience positive, then you're not going to have a healthy culture because people are going to be frustrated. People are not going to get things done. As a company, it'll be inefficient, and on a personal basis, people will be frustrated. And you won't keep people who want to do good work because they'll get frustrated, and they'll leave.

But on the flip side, there's levers you can pull, right? You can feed the soil. And for those who arrived a little late, we started the call by saying that, in a garden, you don't feed the plants. You can just throw a bunch of chemical fertilizer, and the plants will grow for a while. But as soon as you take away the fertilizer, they die. They go into dramatic decline. Instead, you feed the soil, and then you build a fertile ground where everything just kind of grows without you thinking about it.

Put the work where it really needs to go. Do the work involved to give people opportunities. Know who they are. Know what kind of opportunities would be good for them, and give it to them. And, secondly, build the kind of communication structure and processes that lead to people getting the information that they need so that they know who to talk to. They can talk to them. They have the information they need. You've got things documented as you build them. You've got your processes documented so people can be effective. And that will go so much farther than a bunch of gift cards [laughter].

JUSTIN: I'm trying to think of some specific things that leaders have done for myself or my team that have resulted in growth. And some of the things include, you know, when I've had technical leaders, they've actually been in the code and doing code, you know, writing code and doing code reviews and things like that, spending the time to get to know technically how things go, how things work. And so, that's always been great.

Another one is, you know, it's hard to do if you have multiple, multiple layers, but, you know, the engineering director or the engineering VP them going down to individual engineer level and, like, chatting with them for 15 minutes about themselves and their careers and things like that, where they spend the time getting to know the rank and file. That is something that I've seen be really helpful in terms of, like, encouraging culture growth at a company, and recognizing, you know, asking them, “Oh, you know, what are you working on?” You know, “What's the next step in your career?” You know, “What do you want to do with yourself five years from now?” All those sorts of things.

And it doesn't have to take long. But, you know, spending those 15, 20 minutes to get to know the people who are actually doing the grunt work has resulted in a lot more...a better view of leadership than it not.

MIKE: We've covered quite a bit of ground. We've talked about the importance of actually building, you know, what matters, and allowing people to grow on their own, and kind of used that as the framework we've focused on, about the downsides to thinking that you can just throw perks at the problem and call that culture because it doesn't work in the long term. And we've talked about things specifically that you can do. You know, we've talked a little bit about growth.

You know, I will say, schedule time. One thing I've seen be incredibly effective is just saying, you know, 30 minutes a day or whatever the number is, do something to study and grow your skills. And then, you have to lead by example. Not everybody can do this, but a lot of times your tech lead, your media leads can do that and show they're doing that. And maybe get other people doing it, you know, pair. Pair with people so that they can learn from you.

And there's probably a great number of other things you can do. But it has to be on top of your mind. You have to actually know the people you're working with. Recognize what their needs are and do something to meet those needs. And then, finally, set up the conditions where they can work effectively, where they're not always stuck, where they're not blocked by something. And so, they can, you know, work effectively and get stuff done like we all want to do.

WILL: I'd like to close in saying that extreme programming solves all these problems [laughter], and we shall rise again [laughter].

JUSTIN: I've never regretted time invested in making sure people understand, you know, how to be a better engineer, like, whether that's very specific on a task or a, you know, how things work. It's like an investment in time that will pay off later on. But that's the thing, you've got to spend the time.

MIKE: You've got to spend the time. You can't cheat [laughs]. Great. Well, thank you. Interesting discussion today. Hopefully, you've gotten something from it. And until next time on the Acima Development Podcast.