Creating a Great Culture for Your Engineering Team
Successful teams are built on a solid foundation and this starts with crafting a great culture in which engineers can work, grow and evolve.
Start With a Solid Foundation: Hire the Right Talent!
While hiring and retaining the best and brightest is always important, when building the foundation of a team, hiring the right talent also means hiring for cultural fit. The foundation of a team should work well together, leveraging each other’s talents to improve overall performance.
Diversity as the Rule, Not the Exception
Just as important as cultural fit is diversity. This diversity, in skill sets as well as educational and life experience, has been proven to boost creativity and problem solving in teams. Diverse teams are also more successful and engaged.
Encourage Exploration but With Guidance
Once a group of diverse top performers is in place, they should be given wide latitude to explore in order to find solutions to problems. Exploration allows for discovery and creativity to grow and thrive. Fostering an environment that builds on exploration is vital to innovation. Keep in mind, while exploration is crucial, especially in the early stages of team building, it’s best if done in a directed manner so as to not prohibit productivity. This can be achieved by providing careful guidance and mentoring by leadership.
Create an Environment That Allows for Open Debate
For an engineering team to solve problems, there must be an environment that encourages and allows for open debate. All team members must feel comfortable expressing their opinions knowing they and their opinions will be respected and they won’t be judged. The best way to ensure this positive environment exists is to make sure that HR policies are in place that enforce this culture of respect and that the overall corporate culture models this behavior.
Allow for the Positive Giving and Receiving of Feedback
In addition to ensuring a safe environment for open debate, there must also be a culture that emphasizes giving and receiving of feedback both positive and negative. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of any organization as it is human nature to want to avoid conflict. However, feedback in both forms is necessary to improve culture and productivity. Negative feedback (in a non-disciplinary format) is critical as it helps the employee understand what the organization expects of them. Positive feedback creates an environment where contributions are recognized which can strengthen an engineering team by reinforcing a sense of value.
Moving Forward with Expert Support
A great engineering team starts with a great culture. A great culture starts with the right people. When forming the foundation of an engineering team it’s best to seek out the services of an expert, professional recruiter. PEAK is a market leader in the recruiter of top industry talent. At PEAK Technical Staffing, we work with our clients to provide them with the right candidates with the right experience and cultural fit who can help grow their businesses on day one and beyond.
About PEAK
PEAK Technical Staffing is a leading provider of engineering staffing services, offering contract staffing, contract-to-hire and direct hire solutions throughout the United States. With nearly fifty years of technical recruiting experience, we find solutions that meet more than just your technical requirements.
We work closely with you to make sure every candidate fits your company’s unique needs and culture. See some of the engineering jobs we have recently filled for our clients.
If you are looking for skilled, experienced engineering professionals to help your business succeed, contact the recruiting experts at PEAK Technical Staffing today.