Snyk works to empower software-driven businesses to develop their projects faster and more securely via the company’s unique developer-first approach to open-source and cloud security. The company, like nearly every global business, has been forced to pivot into unknown operational territory in response to the COVID-19 pandemic’s spread.
Dipti Salopek, VP of People, describes the Snyk culture as “familial, intimate, warm, and based on an explicit extension of trust.”
When the COVID-19 crisis hit, Salopek says those existing attributes translated into an employee base whose mutual affection and respect for each other helped grease the wheels for the move to remote work for the whole staff. Valuably, Snyk already had a subset of remote workers who were more than happy to help.
“Our normally remote employees, who until then had been in the minority, instantly reached out with tips, suggestions, and offers of support for other employees going through this for their first time. Throughout the process, we have aimed to stay ahead of the curve consistently. In early February we pulled together a response framework that allowed us to identify thresholds that would trigger different levels of pandemic response,” Salopek says.
“The framework allowed us to quickly transition from higher levels of office cleaning to travel bans to full remote work quickly. Being earlier in the game than most other companies, Snyk was one of the first to opensource this framework to help other, smaller companies, think through their pandemic responses.”
Despite having a leg up to the necessary transition in terms of several of Snyk’s existing business practices, the company was unavoidably still impacted by the onset of the virus.
“We quickly realized that the primary concern for us was a human one rather than one of productivity. We had employees dealing with families stuck at home in close quarters, employees struggling with isolation, and employees dealing with anxiety around the illness and surrounding uncertainty,” Salopek says. “Our response was to focus on giving employees what they needed – the flexibility, the community, the distraction, the emotional support – to help employees first and foremost deal with this situation at a human level.”
Salopek readily identifies the COVID-19 crisis as the most significant challenge Synk has faced as an organization. “The largest challenge was the volume of uncertainty and the absence of available, accurate information and prediction models. We rose to this by relying on our values to speed up the decision-making process,” Salopek says.
The company’s values each had real-world, direct roles to play as the nation – and Snyk – reeled from the changes and decided on how best to approach a notably uncertain future in terms of how and where Americans work, not to mention the economic fallout that has resulted from necessary defensive mechanisms, the country took on to fight the progress of the virus.
“We live by our values, which act as our north star,” Salopek says.
One Team: “We had a subgroup in the exec team that met every other day, and stayed in constant communication over Slack in-between meetings,” Salopek says. That group decided early to divide focus between identifying what the ramifications of COVID-19 were going to be, how to best take care of and support employees in light of the virus, how to strengthen internal communications, and how to deal with external economic developments. “Between these factors, we could triage between short-term or immediate and longer-term ramifications and developments swiftly.”
Care Deeply: “Above all else, we recognized that this was a human crisis over an economic one. All our decisions, whether it was to ban travel right at the onset, move to full-remote ahead of most others, offer support through isolation and flexible family time, or to offer most of our value of caring determined impacted customers six months of our product for free deeply in everything we do.”
Ridiculously Easy to Work With: “We were deliberately transparent with our employees and chose to communicate frequently on changes, status updates, and learnings – so that our employees knew we had a plan and had an opportunity to input into it.”
Ship it: Recognizing that speed trumps perfection in times of crisis, the company pivoted with the fast-evolving nature of the crisis, creating a critical incident response approach to triage, which involved making small decisions frequently and iteratively and implementing them swiftly. “We had a sub-part of the executive team that would touch base at least 2-3 times per week, to evaluate all available factual information, updates, and pivot our action strategy literally by the day or hour.”
Keeping a new remote team in some semblance of the shape was in before, when everyone worked in the office, is conceptually a little bit like dumping your aquarium in the ocean and expecting the fish to stay in formation. For many companies, understanding how their team operates in crisis mode was a discipline that needed to be learned on the fly.
According to Salopek, Snyk leaned heavily on several pillars to keep together as a team during COVID-19.
“We indexed on over-communication. Whether it was frequent meetings as a sub-team at the executive level, within the People team, in dedicated Slack channels, or broader channels intended to capture the pulse of employee feedback.”
“We leveraged remote collaboration tools. We used Slack for a-synchronous information exchange and used Zoom for video conferencing. “
“We provided proactive support. We built out Employee and Manager guides for remote work,to help support the transition to being an entirely virtual organization.”
“We reached out 1-1. We had members of our People team reach out to more vulnerable employees to keep a pulse on the individual experience, which helped guide how we provide support.”
“We supported our managers. We built communication channels and support processes for our managers to provide a stream of information, insight into business impacts, and future direction, allowing for a place to ask questions and raise doubts. This helped empower and strengthen our managers as our first line on the ground.”
Overall, Salopek says she is “incredibly proud of how the company has been leading from the front in response to Coronavirus, our support of our Snykers, and our aid efforts to contribute back to the economy as a whole. In the face of unprecedented challenges, our team has displayed tremendous leadership, solidarity, and community.”
So Snyk continues, in a new form shaped by COVID-19, with existing values in place and operating seamlessly when needed most. How many of these new business practices will become part of the new normal at the workplace and in life frustratingly remains to be seen. Any company as ready and willing as Snyk to course-correct in a time of crisis will be prepared to thrive in whatever the future has in store.
