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Culture Hacking With A Staff Database main image

Culture Hacking With A Staff Database

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When your startup is just you and the cat, your company communication problems are largely whether or not the cat listens when you tell it to get off your keyboard. Scale to a handful of people and you still know everyone, what they’re working on, where they are, and how to get hold of them when you need them. As you scale further, communication becomes increasingly complex. And then Mother Nature throws a hurricane at you and you really need to know that everyone is safe and well, and do it quickly and efficiently.

We’ve tried to solve “who” problems with an open, accessible staff database.

Free your staff data

Most companies will have some form of HR system with all sorts of useful information in it, but much of that is private and confidential, and locked away (and rightly so). What’s needed is something more basic: Who is this person? What do they look like? Where are they? What do they do? How to I get in touch with them?

But, because we took our HR data and re-published the “safe” bits to a database, the staff directory data is completely at our mercy. We’re not subject to what the designers of our HR information system think people should look at. And if what we need changes, we can adapt to suit.

Even better, because the data is in the same ecosystem as our regular web site data, anyone who knows how to build something for etsy.com can also build something with our staff data with no particular extra knowledge. Making it easy to hack (unsurprisingly) makes for more hacks, and more hacks allows for useful and unexpected tools to crop up to help you scale better, without any particular central planning.

Who are you?

The obvious thing to build on top of this database is a “staff directory”. We have one, it’s great. It lives with our other internal web-based support tools, easily available to all. For an organisation merrily blazing past Dunbar’s number, it’s critical in helping us maintain a sort of “outboard brain” for who’s who in the company. (This is an ongoing problem, since we’re still hiring.)

Extending that, during a past Hack Week, a group of us built a game where you were given a photo of someone, and multiple choices for who they were. Add to that score tracking and a leader board and we had people enthusiastically learning who everyone in the company was. (It was too easy for some people, so we quickly developed a mode where you had to actually type in the right name - the game equivalent of meeting them in a hallway.)

Guest 2

Smooth small bumps as well as large ones

Hacks don’t have to be complex to be useful. Adding a “You’ve Got Mail” button to the directory simplified the process of sorting the incoming physical mail to the office and meant that people didn’t have to go and check the mail room regularly. Being able to smooth out even minor niggles like this contributes to the feeling of an office that just works.

They don’t even have to be permanent features to be useful - one-off queries can be valuable too. At one point, I needed to work out which of my colleagues sold vintage items on Etsy in order to do some research on a new feature. I could have emailed everyone and hoped to get replies, but instead I could extract the list of staff shops from the directory, and then extract their listings from the listings table, and work out exactly who sold vintage.

Are you OK?

A rather more acute and impromptu use for the data came during Hurricane Sandy, when we wanted to be able to do a roll call to make sure our colleagues were safe and sound. It was trivial to take the data, export name, location, phone numbers, and team to CSV and import it into Google Docs, and then we had a shared document where we could track how everyone was.

At the same time, we wanted everyone to be able to get everyone’s contact details into their phones easily in case we needed to get hold of people quickly. Some quick checking of Google and Wikipedia produced the vCard spec and, while not cutting edge, the 3.0 version is very amenable to quick hacking. (More recent versions are fine too, of course, but 3.0 hit the spot for the amount of time and energy I had available for hacking.)

There are many, many fields in the full spec, but it’s the work of moments to identify the main ones we care about: name, email, phone numbers, and organization.We also happened to have a field for Skype nicks, so I went ahead and added that. (Staff members have voluntarily entered their phone numbers in our staff database, and the vCards are only accessible for the staff directory, so we felt safe that these vCards would be acceptable. You should always consider your company’s data sources and culture, as well as information security issues when hacking on company data.)

In addition, we have photos of many of our staff members on the about us page, so I did some quick work to include a photo where we had one. (The vCard spec allows you to embed photos as base64-encoded strings.) Nothing complicated, and only a few minutes to implement, but it adds a nice polish to the cards.

We can generate sets of vCards for departments and teams, the whole organisation, just new hires, etc., to make managing your contacts easier.

Call me, maybe

The last hurricane-inspired hack we did was an emergency broadcast system so that we could quickly update staff members by SMS about rapidly-changing events or urgent alerts (such as unplanned office closures). We already have a Twilio account, along with PHP libraries to use it so all that was required was to validate the phone numbers to make sure they were valid US numbers, and provide a little bit of code to filter the directory by location (we only want to SMS Brooklynites if the Brooklyn office is closed, for example) and the actual sending is simply sending a suitable request to the Twilio REST API. The implementation also included plenty of error logging and reporting and the like because it’s important to know who you didn’t alert too.

Megaphone

Future work may include extending the system to accept replies, so that we can get the bulk of roll calls done quickly and be able to concentrate on finding and helping those who need it.

When HR systems go to the dogs

One of the notable features of our staff directory’s database schema is the “human” column. The office dog pack is a sufficiently important and intrinsic part of the office culture that it was considered necessary to include them in the database. The past Hack Week saw an expansion of this with a full Doggie DB hack that lets you get to know the pack better. And it might seem trivial on the surface, but that’s because you haven’t had to use the “You’ve Got Poop” button….

Doggie DB

All these hacks were (a) easy, (b) unforeseen when we started the staff database project, and (c) helped us in growing the business and keeping our colleagues safe and informed. Grab your company’s data and see what you can do.

You can follow Ian on Twitter at @indec.