Cultural anchors: every team needs a Larry

This is Larry. He’s a good boy.

Larry is a cat belonging to Nicole, one of our engineers. He inadvertently became a bit of a turning point for us as an engineering team. 

The culture void

In the early months of 2020 we only had a few engineers. None of them had been with the company for more than a couple of months, and in those months we’d been rushing to get out some features that were going to be transformative for the business. Typical early start up stuff. Of course everyone smashed it and did an amazing job at churning out those features, but there was one big problem: we had skipped the “getting to know each other” phase. We’d developed plenty of software, but not our culture.

Then 2020 kicked into full gear and lockdown started. It’s really hard to become friends with people when you’re sitting in different homes only interacting via PRs and the occasional slack message. It was obvious that something needed to be done, so someone brought it up at a retrospective and we had an open chat about how to have better interactions with each other. The solution we came up with: an open daily video call for 30 minutes that everyone can jump on just for the sake of social interaction.

At first it was super awkward (at least for me). Nobody could leave the house so there was little to talk about, made worse by the fact most of the team were introverts. Putting that group of people into a call for 30 minutes a day and telling them to socialise was always a long shot. But then something happened. Larry showed up.

“villain-larry”

An icon was born

Desperate for things to talk about, 5 minutes of the call every day turned into the “awww look at the cute cat with a grumpy face” session. Soon people were more interested in updates on Larry than the daily COVID press conferences. It gave the team a reason to communicate about things other than work and the ongoing apocalypse.

Before long Larry had become an integral part of the team culture. Slack emojis were created so people could add a little Larry to their interactions. Any time there’s a Larry update the whole team stops to hear. On people’s first day they’re given the story of Larry and encouraged to drop as many “woah-larry” emojis as they can.

“woah-larry”

But Larry was just the start. Now that people had an ice breaker, it became a lot easier to chat to each other about all sorts of things outside of work. A team culture started to flourish, and we started knowing and caring more about each other’s lives. When that happens general happiness as work increases, which in turn increases productivity.

Every good team needs a Larry

This Larry effect is nothing new. Thinking back to previous teams I’ve been in, they’ve all had a seemingly silly rallying point in their cultures. In one job it was the company mascot. In another it was a set of big speakers that played memes any time someone broke or fixed the build (and annoyed everyone else in the office!). All just simple things that people can easily understand, get involved in, and feel part of the team.

If you’re starting a new team or company and struggling with culture, keep an eye out for your own Larry. A simple core is all it takes to kick start a unique team culture.