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SPEAKER 1: The 2021 State of DevOps Report
released last year.
It contained findings about how teams navigate
key areas of software delivery.
We talked with one of the researchers, Dustin Smith,
about the report's section on team culture.
What did this section of the report focus on?
DUSTIN SMITH: We look at how team culture impacts
a team's ability to perform.
We've done that for several years.
And, as I had mentioned, we look at a lot of factors,
and team culture tends to be one that's
really important because it has a direct connection
to performance both for a team's ability to deliver software
quickly and reliably and meet their profitability goals,
their organizational goals.
SPEAKER 1: What separates elite teams from the rest?
DUSTIN SMITH: Yeah, when we look at good team culture,
we use Ron Westrum's model of organizational culture, which
has essentially a taxonomy that runs
the gamut from a pathological team that blames people
for making errors, all the way to bureaucratic,
that has a little more red tape set up within it,
to a generative team culture, which is performance-oriented,
it's highly cooperative, and a culture of no blame, right?
And so what does a culture of no blame look like?
Well, you have to be willing to give your teams some room
to make mistakes.
And they have to feel like if they make a mistake
they're not going to be punished for that.
And this creates a culture where you're more reflective, where
you know that if you take a chance, if you take a risk,
even if you fail, you're still going to learn from that,
and you'll be better the next time you
try something like that.
And this creates a group of people
that then want to innovate more and they're not
afraid of doing so.
They don't need to just stay within the rails of how
the team was originally designed to operate.
And we find that teams that are like that
are higher performing.
SPEAKER 1: What is a generative team culture?
DUSTIN SMITH: Generative team culture
comes from Ron Westrum's model of organizational culture,
which runs from all the way to a pathological team culture,
which is--
punishes kind of people for making mistakes,
to a bureaucratic team culture, all the way
to a generative team culture, which
focuses not on the mistakes but how you can improve
from the mistakes, and how best to work together
to improve over time.
They're performance-oriented they want--
they see opportunities to get better and capitalize
on those things.
SPEAKER 1: What is the makeup of generative teams?
DUSTIN SMITH: What we find is that when
teams are made up of a group of people that are diverse
and come from different backgrounds,
and they feel like when they bring up something
from their expertise, when they have an opinion or an idea,
that their team will be accepting of that.
Maybe not everyone will agree on it but their opinion is valued
and there can be value taken from their point.
When teams feel like they can do this,
they feel comfortable sharing ideas
and that they'll be supported by the people around them,
they feel a part of that group, they're higher performing
but they're also less likely to experience burnout as a result.
SPEAKER 1: How does team culture relate to burnout?
DUSTIN SMITH: So we used Christine Maslach's definition
of burnout for this report.
And we looked at things like, do you
feel exhausted when you're doing your work?
Are you bringing those negative feelings home,
and is that affecting your home life outside of work?
Are you able to actually separate yourself
from your work?
Are you starting to feel cynical about that?
And we put all of that together and we look at which
teams are experiencing that.
And we find that teams with a good team culture.
So are they generative?
People feel like they belong, do they feel included,
are half as likely to experience burnout.
And why that's so important is that we're
going through a pandemic right now and a lot of people
are experiencing burnout.
SPEAKER 1: So what's the core idea
of this section of the report?
DUSTIN SMITH: I think trying to motivate people
to focus not just on what are the technical practices that
need to be implemented on a team in order
to be successful but also look at your people
over those things, and focus on, how
can we make our people feel more supported?
How can they take small risks?
How can they feel like they can innovate?
Focusing on those things are a win for employers,
for businesses because it, like I mentioned earlier,
reduces burnout, reduces attrition, all while increasing
productivity and organizational goals.
SPEAKER 1: Where can users go to learn more?
DUSTIN SMITH: That's a great question,
for everything DevOps at Google you can go
to cloud.google.com/DevOps.
There, you can find the State of DevOps 2021 Report.
Like I mentioned, it's completely free.
You just need to sign up and you can download the report.
But there are also other assets there.
If you want to read about any of these individual capabilities
that we mention here, for example, team culture, burnout,
we have specific articles written about those topics
and how you could apply those practices.
And finally, we have the DevOps Quick Check,
which also allows you to measure your own performance, a really
five-question survey, and get a rough idea of how
are you performing relative to the industry.