An Honest Look into our Engineering Team Engagement Survey

It’s been a busy season for our engineering, product, and design teams at Buffer — what we collectively refer to as EPD. In the past eight months alone, we hired a Chief Product Officer for the first time, promoted a team member to be our first VP of Design, completely overhauled and restructured how we organize our EPD teams, created new roles on the team and hired 10 new product and engineering team members to our now 48-person EPD area.

That’s a lot of change. Thus, in the spring of 2021, we put out a survey to the EPD teams to understand the level of engagement of our team members and our “eNPS” — employee NPS, or if team members would recommend Buffer as a place to work.

I did a deep dive into the experience of the engineering team in particular – the results were an honest, eye-opening look into the experience of our team members, and we have a lot of action steps to take from our learnings.

A few key takeaways:

Engineering teammates have very distinct and differing needs depending on their tenure at Buffer (6+ years, 2-6 years, less than 2 years).
Women on the engineering team have a much lower eNPS than their male counterparts.

Below, we’d love to share the survey results transparently through the note I shared with our team.

Hi team,

Thanks so much for completing the EPD Engagement survey. Here's the breakdown for us in engineering:

Engagement is quite high, and eNPS at 38 is ok. About half of you actively recommend Buffer as a place to work, half feel it’s kind of ok, and a couple of people actively do not recommend Buffer.

If we break it down, a few more interesting things emerge:

Breakdown by tenure

Veterans: 6+ years at Buffer

Veterans feel most committed to the company (100%), positive about coworkers (100%), and feel they belong here (100%) but don’t see themselves really growing in their careers anymore (29%).

This makes sense: only people who like their coworkers and company would stay over six years, and also, at that time frame, managers need to work harder to find career growth opportunities.

So the focus for this group is career growth, and that’s the main driver of going from “it’s ok” to “it’s great here.” This honestly does get harder as time goes on — to keep a growth curve after many years — and so we need to get more creative with these conversations. With Lattice reviews and growth plans happening now, that’s one way to think about what’s next for veteran teammates.

Tenured Teammates: 2-6 years at Buffer

Teammates who have been here 2-6 years are our largest group. Engagement & eNPS are the same as the all-engineering average, and this includes some people who actively don’t recommend Buffer as a …read more

Source:: Buffer Blog