Our employees are a passionate and rapidly growing group committed to asking hard questions and upholding our values every day.
Our work culture is simultaneously enriched and challenged by these individuals.
Leadership is a collective experience
We want all employees to be leaders, drive change, and share their ideas—regardless of seniority, tenure, or title. We create an environment in which every employee has the agency to question processes and speak his or her mind, thus contributing to our company’s ongoing evolution.
Systems reviews
Our engineering management team wanted to capitalize on their group’s multiple perspectives by instituting shared governance. To do this they developed systems reviews, one-hour sessions in which managers bring systemic issues to the table and prioritize them for investigation by a collective vote. What started as an experiment in democratized decision making has proven to maximize collective knowledge and offer a stronger approach to problem solving.
Leadership dens
Some of our best problem solving occurs in safe spaces with trusted colleagues. Leadership dens bring together groups of five to eight managers from across the company on a biweekly basis to share best practices and support one another through leadership challenges. Dens are professionally facilitated and are governed by ground rules, allowing for safe reflection. Although dens are optional, 60% of managers take part in them. Employees have described dens as “awesome work therapy” and a “critical sanity check.”
Data-driven development
Understanding what people need to thrive at work is key to Etsy’s leadership development. We apply research from diverse fields to inform best practices across the organization.
Learning and development
Our Learning and Development team merges innovative learning formats with evidence-based leadership practices. Applying research from organizational psychology, sociology, and adult learning theory—in addition to a deep knowledge of Etsy’s values and culture—the team facilitates trainings, retreats, and coaching, and offers online resources on everything from how to fix a boring meeting to how to give difficult feedback.
Reimagining feedback
We want our culture to be one of continuous self-development, where employees have the ability to give and receive feedback that is timely, useful, and actionable. To achieve this we had to take a step back from traditional feedback models—including the system we’d used for years. We applied research on the ways employees process and implement feedback to design new methods of feedback collection.
In 2014 we developed a system that enables year-round, 360-degree feedback collection, delivers rich information to employees, and strengthens their connection to their managers. It takes less time than more traditional performance review models and the structure makes comments more actionable, leading to ongoing development throughout the year.
Over 120 employees helped us test our new feedback tools. We plan to launch this innovative feedback system company-wide in 2015.
Blameless problem solving
Making mistakes is an inevitable by-product of doing innovative work. Accidents can actually be valuable and rich sources of learning. We strive to create a blameless culture, in which it is safe to make mistakes and to speak up about them. This allows us to gain as much knowledge as possible from our experiences.
We have built multiple institutionalized programs that enable us to understand the circumstances that lead to mistakes and distill what we can learn from them. When employees take shared responsibility for mistakes and failures, they can recognize them as stepping stones for better work in the future. In 2014 we held more than 100 Postmortems, meetings where employees debrief after major incidents, collectively create a timeline of events, and develop remediation strategies. By understanding the various conditions that contribute to incidents, recommendations can be made to make things work better in the future. We are building a company-wide infrastructure for new processes called learning reviews, so everyone will be able to access resources that enable us to continuously unearth new opportunities for improvement.
Fostering innovation
Every year we give all employees a chance to step away from routine tasks, think expansively, and collaborate on new ideas during our company “Hack Week.” Hacking solutions goes back to Etsy’s roots. Many of the most awesome features of our site stemmed from successful hack projects.
Over the years our hacking tradition has transformed from an exclusively technical event to a company-wide festival of innovation and collaboration. The ability to “favorite” an item by hovering over the thumbnail image was built during Hack Week. So was a tool in our staff directory that lets employees send personalized recognitions to co-workers. We even used Hack Week to create an “Etsy Museum of Unusual History,” an experiential record of the early beginnings of our company and the community we serve, complete with punk-rock-style handmade buttons from craft fairs back in the day and an embroidered art piece paying homage to a site glitch— still a coveted inside joke.
Generosity of spirit
Generosity of spirit is the belief that knowledge and experience should be shared for the greater good. This concept started as a principle of our engineering team and has taken root all over the company. We model generosity of spirit by freely sharing knowledge and talents with co-workers, open-sourcing code and programs, and offering our learnings to organizations outside Etsy.
Etsy School
One of the most beloved manifestations of our learning-focused culture is Etsy School—interactive classes taught by employees for employees. Anyone is free to teach a class on any topic they want. Dozens of Etsy School classes have been offered over the years, including knot-tying, fabric dying, herbalistic medicine, juggling, and Python programming. The School’s grassroots structure creates a unique opportunity for employees to share their talents with co-workers, collectively contributing to one another’s professional, mental, physical, and spiritual growth.
170 unique classes have been offered since the program launched.
Lunch ‘n’ Learns
Lunch ‘n’ Learns provide regular occasions for open, ad hoc, educational experiences. Nearly every week, people across the company sign up to present on any work-related topic they choose. These events, which are leadership opportunities for presenters and learning opportunities for the whole staff, are so popular that employees tune in from all over the globe (many are standing-room- only for those participating in person). Examples of past Lunch ‘n’ Learn topics include: “Responsible Manufacturing,” “Labor Economics,” “Machine Learning at Etsy,” and “All About B Corp.”
There were 39 Lunch ‘n’ Learns in 2014.
"First Push" program
Last year we introduced the First Push program, which teaches employees with non-technical backgrounds how to deploy code to Etsy’s website. As part of our commitment to ongoing learning, we teach the art of writing code to anyone who is interested. The First Push program helps participants get a better understanding of our platform’s foundation and how and why changes are made to the site. It also gives our engineering team the opportunity to share their craft with their peers.
Last year 20 engineers taught 51 of their non-engineer co-workers how to push code in Brooklyn, Hudson, London, and Dublin.
Code as Craft
One of Etsy’s governing principles is valuing craftsmanship in all we make and do. The code in which the site is written is a craft in its own right, and we take pride in openly sharing our process with the programming industry. Our dedicated blog, Code as Craft, covers the tools we use, our approach to engineering, and experiments that have succeeded and failed.
Since the blog launched in 2010, engineers across the company have published a total of 131 posts to Code as Craft, with an average of 20 to 30 posts per year.