Choose Boring Culture is a new article by Charity Majors which in my opinion would be useful for engineering managers here and also to the technical leaders.

In this article, she argues that there are two types of culture: formal and informal. Formal culture is what a company and its managers build. Its goal is to make the company to succeed. And it includes all the formal policies around vacation days, compensation, postmortems, team structure, roles, promotions, etc.

All the "funny stuff" is a part of the informal culture. Informal culture is still important, but this is something that should grow organically. So, please, do not force "mandatory fun" on your employees.

And a quote from this article:

 a leader, you should absolutely care about your culture, but your primary responsibility is the health of the business. The purpose of your culture is to make your business succeed. It does not serve you, and it does not serve the people you care about, to be unclear on this front.

#culture