A chat with Kiefer Slaton, web development director
“If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” is one of those benign platitudes that’s been around so long its original author has been lost to time. Credit aside, truer words about work have yet to be spoken. A recent survey from Pew found that more than half of all Americans enjoy their work, but what makes work, “work” for the happy among us? The secret sauce, believe it or not, is work culture.
What Is Work Culture?
Work culture is the collective attitude, belief system, behaviors, and values that define how employees interact with one another and how an organization operates is said organization’s work culture. It’s something you feel in the air. Research indicates that workplace culture stands above all other factors, including salary and easy of commute, when taking a new position or staying at their current employer.
How Mad Genius Does Work Culture
There are many ingredients that go into the Mad Genius work culture stew. There’s the standard stuff like driven supervisors that trust in their employees’ abilities. There are flexible employees who not only expect, but want to be given ever-changing and challenging projects to work on. There’s healthy competition between creative minds, always looking to push the limits for both our clients and the agency. Our vision, “deliver the unexpected,” speaks best to what Mad Genius’s work culture is all about.
Each department within Mad Genius fosters a unique environment that feeds into the overall work culture. Try to think of our various departments as vital organs, or part of an engine, for more squeamish readers. These parts need to function well individually for the whole to perform at its best.
One such part is the web team. It’s a place where artistic flare means techno-wizardry; where highly skilled professionals can push the limits of CSS to create bold new designs that’ll look beautiful on smartphone, desktop, and anything else connected to the internet. Our web department is led by Kiefer Slaton, who gave up the insight on what work culture means for his team.
Q&A With Kiefer
“Define the Mad Genius Web team’s work culture in three words.”
Efficient, collaborative, and I want to say innovative, but it sounds cheesy, so I’ll say experimental.
“How do you ensure that your team’s work aligns with the agency’s overarching objectives, especially when tackling complex web development projects?”
A lot of it is about translating things. I see the company at large as more of a creative entity. It is a creative agency, after all. That’s certainly true of the web department as well, but on the base level, it’s about making sure the products we’re putting out align with the rest of our (Mad Genius’s) brand.
For example, if [the creative department] is working on a logo, a color scheme, or a billboard, it’s about making sure there’s a consistent brand experience: things like the spacing between letters, the size of buttons, or headers. It needs to be consistent across the board. It’s also making sure that our products are working well over the long term.
That’s where we have to work with other departments to take the ask from the client and translate them into something, and that’s almost more of an engineer job. It’s not only making sure the design matches everything else, it’s also making sure we’re matching the client’s priority from a building standpoint. If they care about security, we’re going to build our project in a certain way to accomplish those goals. If they care more about speed or performance, we can build to accomplish that. It comes down to understanding that client’s objectives. Then thinking about those objectives in terms of what it means for the web team, and it’s more than what the storefront presentation is.
“Can you discuss how you encourage innovation and experimentation within your team, and why it’s important for your projects?”
A lot of that, to be perfectly honest, is simply driven by who we are as a company. It’s in our vision, right? “Deliver the unexpected.” We have a culture that’s all about innovation and experimentation. And in particular, when we’re thinking about the web, building websites can easily turn into copying someone else’s code and slapping a new color scheme on it and calling it a client’s “new” website. Easy enough work, but we find ourselves in countless situations where that won’t cut it.
A recent example was Yates Construction, where they had these gorgeous 3D renders of their projects, that matched to scale what they’ve actually built out in the world, and they wanted to find a way to showcase those on their website. But we couldn’t find an example of where that’s been done before. The spirit of “deliver the unexpected” naturally pushed our team to do something that hasn’t necessarily been done before. We were a bit of a laboratory trying to figure that out for the first time.
The other piece of that, innovation and experimentation, means those are qualities we prioritized very highly when we built our team. I’m more apt to hire a new developer, one I can tell has a more entrepreneurial spirit; someone who wants to experiment and wants to try new things. I’ll hire that person ten times over versus a developer that might have every single technical requirement for the role, but they only want to play in spaces they’re comfortable in. I don’t have to encourage innovation and experimentation within the web team, I’d say it’s practically a requirement.
“How do you ensure ongoing professional development and training for your team to stay current with industry trends and technologies?”
As a team, we foster a culture of always brining new things or new ideas to the table. If our team sees a website, or video, or tweet, or anything about a new tool, we want them to bring it to the table and show it to everyone. We have Discord chat that’s all about sharing those sorts of things and ideas with one another, and when someone brings something up, we talk about it. “Where could we use this?” “Is this a good replacement for something we already have?” “Is this an upgrade of an existing tool we’re using?”
Moreover, we look for regional conferences, and there are a lot of really great web development ones out there. Speakers will come and give presentations about the newest and cutting-edge technologies. Even if it’s not something we would directly apply to what we’re doing presently, it’s still helpful, if only to make us start thinking about how we could do our projects differently.
So yes, we reach outside for resources, we intentionally set aside time for continuing education, but we just encourage one another to share a new tool when we find it.
“What strategies do you use to maintain high levels of engagement and motivation, particularly during long or challenging projects?”
Two ways really: understanding that there are periods when you have to push really hard, and in turn knowing the periods when you get to back off. I think that’s true throughout the agency, just by the nature of our work, but it’s even more so true in the web department. Mainly because we often have to sprint for a week or two at the end of a project. There’s just a lot to do before a website launches. We have to make sure everything is clean, quality controlled, and tested.
After those periods, I try to make sure I’m a lot more flexible with our team. I follow a simple philosophy of “if you give me effort with hard work, I’ll reward you with easy work. Or some additional time off.” I try to offer as much flexibility around that as I can while making sure we get our work done.
Most of it (maintaining engagement and motivation) is on the team we have. We have a team of people that truly enjoy what they do. I’ll frequently catch my team going the next mile, and not because I’ve asked, or we’re in a crunch, but simple because they want to. The natural motivation of the team is very high and as much as I would like to, I can’t take a lot of credit for that.
“What approaches do you use to handle and resolve conflicts within your team, ensuring that these issues do not disrupt team dynamics or productivity?”
We prioritize respect over everything else. Web development is a space that’s so broad and changes so fast, it means you can learn from one another. Even the junior developer who comes in with six months of experience can teach something to the senior developer that has ten years on the job. The tools and languages they learned in school will be so different from what this person learned.
Keeping that at the forefront of everyone’s minds and acknowledging that everyone has their areas of strength and everyone has their areas of weakness. No person on the team, myself included, has a right to declare, “I’m right and this is how we’re going to do it.” Everything comes to the table as discussion, not a mandate. I think that helps foster mutual understanding and respect.