Engage’s values function as our code of ethics. When we’re stuck in a hard place and asking “can we do this” or “should we do this”, our values provide guidance around what we should do and what we won’t do.
#1 Transparency and Honesty
At Engage, we strive to be clear and open, both with our customers and with our employees. Scheduling issues between customers? Let’s talk about them and make sure everyone knows what we can and can’t deliver, and when. Budget concerns? Get them out on the table, explore options, and work together.
#2 People Over Processes or Tools
There are certainly benefits to standardizing on a set of processes and tools. However, with a team made up of many kinds of people, we often find that there are some processes or tools which aren’t the right fit for the team. Engage prefers to give teams the autonomy to adjust their usage of processes and tools so they can create an optimal approach to working together.
#3 Family-Friendly, Flexible Environment
We recognize that everyone has more important things to take care of than work. We want the employees of Engage to have fun and be motivated to work and collaborate to solve hard problems every day. But, when something more important comes up, we trust our employees to responsibly take care of what’s most important first.
#4 Sustainable Pace
With our intention to be long-term partners with our customers, Engage approaches our work with an eye to avoiding shortcuts. While there’s a place for short-term trade-offs, we get in the habit of keeping the long game in view. We know that we can get the best from our teams by making sure they’re balanced and focused, rather than rushed, stressed, and stretched thin.
Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
Source: Agile Manifesto Principles
#5 Support and Safety
When team members don’t feel safe to share their thoughts, the team can’t produce its best results, and the team members miss out on many of the benefits of working within a team. There’s no easy answer to making people feel supported and safe, so we constantly work to improve our attitudes, systems, policies, practices, and behaviors to help everyone know that their contributions are essential and valuable, and that it’s worth it to step out and bring up their concerns, insights, questions, and wonderings.
#6 Autonomy and Trust
Every team member is expected to deliver value to the team in the best way they know how. We actively avoid micromanaging team members, and trust them, together with the collective judgment of the team, to find the best activities to produce that value. We know that managers’ ideas can’t always be better than the ideas of other team members, and trusting team members to work in the best way they see will produce the best results from the whole team.
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
Source: Agile Manifesto Principles
#7 Continuous Improvement through Reflection
The best teams don’t just figure out one best way of working and leave it at that. There are always ways to improve, big and small. Whether it’s situations that change or people who learn about new options or brainstorm new ideas to try, we value regularly reflecting on how we’re working and experimenting to find improvements to our processes, procedures, and tools. We’re learning and growing together.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Source: Agile Manifesto Principles
#8 Face-to-Face Collaboration
Communication is the heartbeat of a team. We can’t build the right features in the best ways if we don’t all understand where we’re headed. As a result, we value working together and regularly meeting face-to-face (usually over video calls). While chat and email are convenient, and long-term documentation can be important, the regular rhythms of our teams involve hearing and looking at the same things together.
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Source: Agile Manifesto Principles
#9 Challenging and Fun Environment
We believe work should be enjoyable, with a minimum of low-skill work, while fostering an atmosphere of fun and not taking ourselves too seriously.