What steps do you recommend software leaders take if they want to build a team culture that supports continuous learning?
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VP of Engineering5 months ago
To build a team culture that supports continuous learning, I would recommend a few steps. First, it's essential to create a learning environment. With technology evolving every day, it's crucial to always encourage learning, whether it's during town hall meetings or staff meetings. Ask your team members what they have learned recently.Secondly, we need to give our team members time and space. If you have a team of 100 engineers who are continually working on product backlogs, they won't have the time to learn. Therefore, it's crucial to allocate time for learning. For instance, in our Azure product teams, we allocate at least 5 to 10% of the time quarterly for learning, experimentation, or exploring tech.
Lastly, it's vital to communicate the importance of learning to stakeholders. We need to explain that by investing in learning, we are encouraging new experimentations and ways of doing things, which will eventually help us deliver or automate tasks quickly.
Senior Data Scientist in Miscellaneous5 months ago
In our company, we provide a lot of hardware with proprietary interfaces, so continuous learning is very important. The key is to create a culture where people are not hesitant to ask questions. It's a culture of discussing things, even those that seem easy or unimportant, and supporting people to continue asking questions.Experience is a critical skill in our business, and it's something that cannot be learned from books or the internet. It's about working on sites and communicating with others. However, during COVID-19 and the shift to remote work, people have become less communicative than before.
We sometimes mix people from different organizations to discuss the challenges they're facing. It's interesting to see someone from the sales or support team talk about issues that you already know how to solve. These meetings have worked out fairly well in building our culture and promoting continuous learning.