An Trustworthy Look into our Engineering Workforce 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 last eight months alone, we have hired a Chief Product Officer for the first time, promoted a team member to the first VP of Design, completely revised and restructured the organization of our EPD teams, created new roles in the team and hired 10 new members of the product – and engineering teams in our now 48-person EPD area.

That’s a lot of change. We therefore carried out a survey of the EPD teams in spring 2021 to find out the commitment of our team members and our “eNPS” – employee NPS – or whether team members would recommend Buffer as a place to work.

I’ve been looking particularly deep into the engineering team’s experience – the results have been an honest, insightful glimpse into the experiences of our team members, and we can take many action from what we learned.

A couple of key takeaways:

• Engineering teammates have very different and diverse needs depending on their employment 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 would like to transparently share the survey results through the note I shared with our team.

Hello team,

Thank you for taking the EPD engagement survey. Here’s the breakdown for us in engineering:

Engagement is pretty high and eNPS at 38 is fine. About half of you actively recommend Buffer as a place to work, half think it’s okay, and a few people don’t recommend Buffer.

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

Breakdown by tenure

Veterans: 6+ years with Buffer

Veterans feel most connected to the company (100%), positive towards colleagues (100%) and feel they belong here (100%), but do not really see themselves growing in their careers anymore (29%).

This makes sense: only people who like their co-workers and their company would stay over six years, and during that period managers have to work harder to find career opportunities.

So the focus for this group is career growth, and that’s the main reason for switching from “it’s ok” to “it’s great here”. This honestly gets more difficult over time – to keep a growth curve after many years – and so we need to get more creative in these conversations. With Lattice’s reviews and growth plans now happening, this is a chance to ponder next steps for seasoned teammates.

Temporary teammates: 2-6 years at Buffer

Teammates who have been here for 2-6 years are our largest group. Engagement and eNPS are on average for all engineers, and that includes some people who don’t actively recommend Buffer as a place to work.

This group is most satisfied with management (94%) and team culture (94%), but is also the most exhausted group. Only 38% of this group have energy for leisure, friends and family after work. You also don’t feel like this hard work gets noticed: only 44% of respondents say people notice they go the extra mile (or a hundred miles).

For this group, the work-life balance and coping with the workload are in the foregroundhaving burnout and feeling unappreciated is the main concern. This is an active focus for me and for engineering managers who have heard this too.

Newer teammates: Less than 2 years at Buffer

Teammates with less than two years at Buffer are by far the happiest. Again, nobody in this group actively thinks that buffer engineering is a bad place to work. Glad to see this because it means our external image and who we are inside are not very different (if we had been talking about a big game during the recruitment and blogs but the work was awful, we’d see that new people’s eNPS is lower, with many critics).

This group rated every metric 100% (seriously!), With the exception of the feeling of being valued at 67%.

For this group, recognition of contributions, praise and appreciation for their opinion is the most important thing in order to improve. We hear you!

Breakdown by gender

Gender is a factor in which people in the same workplace can have very different experiences. There are other factors as well, but we don’t have any data on them. We have enough people to have dates, which is great. What is not so great is that women in engineering have very different and much worse experiences than men.

Note: All respondents randomly identified themselves as either “male” or “female” within the gender binary, so I only have two categories for gender. That is, there are many genders.

Men in engineering

Women in engineering

Obviously this is a problem. I would rather have a team with an eNPS of 20 and rate all genders “it’s ok here” than some genders say it’s “good to great” and other genders say it’s “just ok” or “ it’s awful “is.

It is also noteworthy that the participation of women in engineering in the survey was somewhat low. This means that an eNPS of 0 is likely to be overestimated. People who don’t complete the survey are usually not particularly happy. More likely, the non-respondents are either passive or negative (“it’s fine and I don’t have time for polls” or “it’s so terrible and hopeless that there is no point taking a poll at all”).

There is good news: at least some women say it’s great to work here! Also, women rated management 100% (we have 50% female engineering managers, so that could be part of that) and they rated team culture 100%: women think their colleagues are qualified and do quality work.

Job satisfaction with 80% is good, as is Fit & Belonging (80%). So the good news is that women don’t feel actively excluded, held back, and discriminated against. That’s a low bar, but it’s one that many teams fail.

For women, labor relations was one of the lowest scores. While “my manager looks after me” and “my colleagues want me to be successful” is 100%, “people know what is going on in my life” is only 20%. Women are uncomfortable talking about what is going on for them outside of work.

Women are also more exhausted above average, only 40% have energy for other things outside of work.

One hypothesis or story here is that the pandemic has hit working mothers particularly hard, and women still pull a double shift in many cases. Working as a mother or looking after parents and relatives is also often stigmatized and women feel exhausted and cannot talk about everything that burdens them at and outside of work. Women are socialized to smile, be nice, not to complain, have everything together and face a lot of guilt and pressure to always be on your toes and always “do anything”. This applies to society as a whole. So it could apply to our engineering women and be a problem if Buffer isn’t doing enough to support them.

Another interesting data point: women underperformed in trust in managerial decisions, with no “strong agreement” and a few “disagreements”. I recently read a post on Be glue that offers a possible explanation here:

Women are socialized as caregivers and often take on extra work to protect their team members from decisions that are made in leadership that could be challenging for others to adapt. The recent changes to the org chart come to mind; there could be other factors as well. If women, statistically, are feeling the effects and are tired of mitigating those effects, while men are more likely to feel the benefits of this gluing / grooming work without so much expense, it could explain some of the differences between men’s and women’s experiences. That’s a hypothesis. It’s a story I could tell from this team’s data and the industry’s data. I don’t know if this is our story.

To learn more about what the story (stories?) Really is, Melissa [our new VP of People] and I’ll be hosting a session with women in engineering to learn more about the engineering experience at Buffer and why it’s different – and worse – than being a man in engineering.

For men reading this, you are invited to share your thoughts with Melissa or me directly. If you have come across anything that could adversely affect your fellow women, I really want to hear about it, and if you have any ideas, please share them.

The reason I don’t include men in this live discussion is because I want to hear the women’s stories from the women because we see in the dates that the story is different for women. I hope this makes sense. I am happy to talk more about it.

limitations

I don’t have enough race and sexual orientation data to have statistically significant sample sizes, so I cannot draw any conclusions for these groups as part of this survey. We know that these groups can have a harder time in the industry as a whole.

In the long run, a more diverse team means more data. In the short term, we must rely on other methods to ensure everyone has a fair experience. There’s still a lot to be done, and if it’s not in the survey results, that work will not be deleted.

-Katie

As we continue to make changes and improvements to the engineering experience at Buffer, we look forward to sharing our insights along the way.

Feel free to contact me on Twitter at @gokatiewilde to continue the conversation about building dedicated and fulfilled engineering teams. Always happy to chat!