Web Directions Culture 2018 Creating better teams

Sydney31st October 2018

Creating better teams and workplace cultures

What is Web Directions Culture?

Running in conjunction with our annual, highly regarded Summit conference, Culture aims to help you build, nurture and get the most from your design and engineering teams.

From hiring to leading, communicating and providing feedback, creating inclusive high performing teams benefits your employees and your organisation.

In this hands-on day, we'll hear from and work with experts deeply experienced in creating great cultures. You'll not just listen, but discuss, workshop and role-play ideas, techniques and scenarios, and leave with a new set of ideas and approaches to getting the most from your teams.

speakers and audience

Who's it for?

Culture is for those helping create team and organisational culture: design and engineering leaders, HR and Culture professionals, Learning and Development Managers. It all takes place in an intimate environment of like-minded professionals with similar challenges and goals.

Web Directions Summit

Culture is part of Web Directions Summit, running the day before the main two day, two track conference for your whole digital team. Come to all three days to both develop your leadership capabilities, and to keep up to speed with the latest development in your field. In fact, we have a special offer to make that even better value.

Extraordinary Speakers, and relevance

We've combed the country and the world for extraordinary speakers, covering the most relevant topics for today's leaders, and creators of culture.

Dom Price

Future of Teamwork

Dom Price Head of R&D and Work Futurist Atlassian

The lone genius is dead. EY reports that 90% of organisations are solving problems so complex, that they need teams. DomPrice, Head of R&D and Work Futurist from Atlassian joins us to share his personal experiences in helping Atlassian scale over the last 5 years, and be more nimble, adaptive and relevant, than ever before.

He'll share why they decided to take on team work, how they did it, and even let us in on some of the pitfalls along the way. This isn't a session on theory. Dom will share practical insights, from Atlassian, and from over 100 other organisations where they've shared their way of working.

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Maria Giudice

Closing Keynote

Maria Giudice Design Leader Hot Studio

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Cyd Harrell

Getting to Resilience

Cyd Harrell former Chief of Staff F8

What does it take to support designers and other tech workers who must constantly teach their practices from a position of lower seniority, while also doing exemplary work? Fresh from a stretch as Chief of Staff at 18F (one of the US’s two national government digital teams), Cyd will discuss fostering a culture that can continue turning out transformative work in difficult times.

She will talk about practice communities, hiring for purpose, and the role of front-line managers as keepers of culture. Cyd will share candid stories and critical learnings from a design and development practice that is changing one of the largest institutions in the world.

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Ted Tencza

The Art and Science of Onboarding

Ted Tencza Head of Engineering Prospa

Bringing new people on to the team can be stressful for both the new person and the current team. This talk outlines 10 principles that organisations can follow to radically improve their new hire onboarding process. It doesn't attempt to prescribe an actual program, but rather gives leaders the tools they need to design one that fits their circumstances.

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Michel Boudreau

Beware of the Mono-Culture Monster

Michel Boudreau Senior Software Engineer PageUp

You've just started at a new company, with your own set of experiences and knowledge, and you're in a meeting with a slew of your colleagues. Everyone else seems to have a similar solution, more or less, except for you have a radically different idea; you pipe up, only to have everyone look at your quizzically. Sound familiar? This is the pitfall of the Mono-Culture, which can breed a Monster resistant to different ideas, perspectives and experiences. Let's slay this beast together.

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Jo Cranford

Building A Growth Framework

Jo Cranford Director of Engineering Culture Amp

What’s the thing that’s holding you back from progression?

This was the question we wanted to help everybody in our Product Development team to answer. We set out to build a Growth Framework by focussing on how to help people understand the behaviours we value at Culture Amp, and how they evolve as people grew in their roles.

It was really important to us that our Growth Framework focussed on helping people grow rather than check boxes. When you start talking about progression, it’s very difficult to avoid this.

In this talk I will share the collaborative, iterative approach we used to build out a Growth Framework that was aligned with our values, and could be used for not only engineers but also product managers, testers, and other roles. I will show the finished product and talk about what we learned along the way.

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Greer Lucas

(Really) Effective Succession Planning

Greer Lucas Principal Consultant & Founder Culture Rocks

7 Steps to having a reliable, current succession plan your people are invested in.

Why is this important

  • Step 1) Prioritise Your Roles
  • Step 2) Identify Your 'Potentials'
  • Step 3) Understand the Impact
  • Step 4) Ask Your People
  • Step 5) Initiate 'Progress2Ready'
  • Step 6) Monitor 'Progress2Ready'
  • Step 7) Maintain Your Plan

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Carmel Hinks

Importance of a healthy communication culture

Carmel Hinks Software Engineer Atlassian

Communication is one of many aspects that can shape and define culture. In the workplace, a culture of open communication can be the difference between an environment that is positive and supportive, or one that is bitter, fearful and fuelled by negative reinforcement. So, how can you ensure you are communicating in a way that drives a positive working culture?

This talk will expand on how Atlassian drives a positive and supportive communication culture, emphasising four major stages of communication that can impact the overall atmosphere of an interaction. You will learn how these stages can assist you as both the communicator and/or the recipient by eliminating noise, efficiently finding agreements, and gaining deeper understandings.

The content will not be presented as a theoretical view, but rather a glimpse into the reality that I have experienced over the past two years.

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Michael Honey

Working Less, Living More

Michael Honey Founder Icelab

Work-life balance an empty promise if you're working too much. There's nothing magical about five days a week, and it's time to take the next step, work less, and live more. It's not about working part-time: this is about full-time being less time.

Michael's company Icelab has run a four-day week for the last ten years. Find out about, the challenges they faced, how they made it work, and why working less means helps build a happier, more creative, more diverse team.

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Georgina Robilliard

Reimagining the company offsite remotely

Georgina Robilliard Head of People and Culture Insured By Us

Spending time together as a team is incalculably valuable, but it’s logistically much harder when your team is remote and spread across multiple timezones. So, we experimented with a ‘virtual offsite’ and it worked!

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Find the conference pass for you

Combined Pass

  • Summit

  • Culture conference

  • Summit & Culture video

  • $1,895 Until 19 October
  • $1,995 Standard

Silver Pass

  • Culture Conference

  • Culture video

  •  
  • $895 Until 19 October
  • $995 Standard

Classic Pass

  • Culture Conference

  •  
  •  
  • $795 Until 19 October
  • $895 Standard

Culture Conference
31 October

  • Fully catered one-day Culture focussed conference
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Summit
1 & 2 November

  • 2 day conference
  • Happy Hour (& ½)
  • Awesome conference coffee
  • Sensational catered breaks
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Culture Videos

  • All the videos from the Culture conference
  • Transcribed and Captioned
  • Annotations, notes, further reading and more for each one
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Summit Videos

  • All the videos from the Summit conference
  • Transcribed and Captioned
  • Annotations, notes, further reading and more for each one
tick to indicate this is included

Find the conference pass for you

Combined Pass

  • Summit

  • Summit & Culture videos

  • Culture conference

  • $1,895 Until 19 October
  • $1,995 Standard

Register Now

Culture Silver Pass

  • Culture Conference

  • Culture Conference video

  •  
  • $895 Until 19 October
  • $995 Standard

Register NowRegister Now

Culture Classic Pass

  • Summit

  •  
  •  
  • $795 Until 19 October
  • $895 Standard

Register Now

Our venue

Web Directions Summit 2018 returns to our longtime home, the International Convention Centre in Darling Harbour.

Getting there:

There are numerous public transport options, and parking available on site.

Accommodation:

If you're coming from out of town, there are many hotel and serviced apartment style accomodation options in Darling Harbour, and otherwise close by.

Partners

At Web Directions we work closely with partners to help make our events even better. Sponsor our coffee, reception, recharge station, or other valued activities and start or grow your relationship with our highly qualified audience.

Contact us for more on how we work can work with you to help you be even more awesome.

Key Partners

twilio logo
bitgenics logo
Servian logo
Servian logo

Praise for past Web Directions events

Phil Whitehouse
Web Directions is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development.

Phil Whitehouse,
Innovation Lead DigitasLBi

Ethan Marcotte
I’ve been admiring the Web Directions events for years, and was honored to be part… What a fantastic event!

Ethan Marcotte,
inventor "responsive Web design"

Dave Greiner
Out of any conference, Web Directions is far and away our favourite

Dave Greiner,
founder Campaign Monitor

About Us

Co-founded and now run by John Allsopp, Web Directions has for nearly 20 years brought together leading developers, engineers, visual, IxD, UX and product designers, Art and Creative Directors, product managers indeed everyone involved in producing web and digital products to learn from one another, and the World's leading experts across this vast field.

We spend our lives thinking about what comes next, keeping up with trends in technology, practices and processes, and filtering the hype, to make sure you don't miss trends that matter, and don't waste time on hype that doesn't.

We promise attending one of our events will leave you significantly better versed in the challenges you face day to day, and in solutions for addressing them.

vignettes from our events, social, speakers and more. Includes Hannah Donovan skylarking.

John Allsopp

John Allsopp has been working on the Web for nearly 30 years. He's been responsible for innovative developer tools such as Style Master, X-Ray and many more. He's spoken at numerous conferences around the World and delivered dozens of workshops in that time as well.

His writing includes two books, including Developing With Web Standards and countless articles and tutorials in print and online publications.

His "A Dao of Web Design" published in 2000 is cited by Ethan Marcotte as a key influence in the development of Responsive Web Design, who's acclaimed article in 2010 begins by quoting John in detail, and by Jeremy Keith as "a manifesto for anyone working on the Web".

Code of Conduct

For over a decade, we've worked hard to create inclusive, fun, inspring and safe events for the Web Industry.

As part of our commitment to these values, we've adopted a code of conduct for all involved: ourselves, our speakers, our partners and our audience.

If you have any concern or feedback, please don't hesitate to contact us.