 Our environments, both physical and digital, affect our behavior. This creates both challenges and opportunities. By putting people into the right environment, we can help them to deliver better results, collaborate more or less, and even have better health outcomes. GitLab team member Christopher Wong will share how and why transparency in a unified working environment can help you to create the kind of workplace where you and your team can thrive. Hello. Hope that you're joining this year's GitLab Commit so far. My name is Christopher Wang, and I want to explore a little bit of a different topic. There are many presentations in this conference that have to do with how technology can improve and make your engineering processes more efficient. But one of the things that I want to talk to you about today is how technology can be used for human good. So that's the reason why I titled this presentation a more human reason for DevOps platforms. A little bit about myself. I'm a solutions architect here at GitLab. I serve the sales development organization, and I run a program called Tanuki Tech. And one of the things that I want to start off with with this presentation is a question. How do you influence people? There's all sorts of different theories on this, but really what I've seen in my career is a couple of groups of leaders. And this really has to do with how they think, sometimes their personality and backgrounds. Sometimes you have leaders that have a background from sales, typically. In a lot of the times, these leaders think about motivating their teams through incentives. So what I mean by that is bonuses, promotions, how to leverage these things to get certain types of behaviors and then how to get certain other types of behaviors reduced. Another type of leader that I've seen in my career is what I categorize as a cultural leader. And so sometimes these people are really great team builders. They're really great at making people feel valued and heard. Sometimes these cultural leaders have really big emphasis on human development and recruiting. The reason my recruiting is such a big important thing is the idea that if we hire the right people, then we can build the right type of team. Other types of people who have more of a background in enablement, they try to get certain types of behavior through lots of enablement sessions. And so the idea is if I want certain types of behavior in my organization, let's go find out what these behaviors are, what they look like, let's build training curriculum around them. Sometimes these types of leaders, they also like to hook in their certification pathways into things like promotion. So the idea is if you want to get a promotion, then you have to go through this, this and this class and take this test. And this is part of your promotion accreditation. And so now asking ourselves the question of is there anything left? The world that we live in right now is really competitive and there are really large complicated problems that need decisive leadership. What is there anything else in this toolbox that we can use to motivate and influence people? And the answer according to VitalSmartz, one of the largest and leading leadership consultancies in the world, is yes. This is a company that is responsible for the book Crucial Conversations and it's also a company that has worked with over half of the Fortune 500 companies here in the United States. And one of the things that it says is that the most overlooked influence technique today in businesses around the world is changing human behavior through changing environments. So what do I mean by that? Why change environments? Well, the answer is that sometimes it's the simplest and most innovative solution. So I want to talk about a little bit of a story. This story has to do with a hospital network in Pittsburgh in the United States. It was a hospital network of around 30 hospitals. And one of the things that it found is that when the children and infants came in to get certain medical procedures that needed CT or MRI scans, that almost all of these children needed sedation. And so the actual statistics on this is almost 100% of the children who needed MRIs and 80% of the children who needed CT scans that they would actually need to get sedated to be able to just even go through these procedures. So this was a really big problem for the hospital network. The reason why is because neurologists are really expensive, they're rare. It also created really poor patient experiences. So a lot of times the children really weren't happy. The parents were scared about their kids being sedated. And so what ended up happening in this story was that this hospital network tried many different things. A lot of these pilots failed. But eventually what ended up happening was that there was an industrial designer by the name of Doug Dietz, and he came up with an innovative solution for this problem. What did Doug do? Very simple. What Doug did was he repainted the rooms in these medical devices to look like an adventure series. And so this is a great example of how if you change your environment, you can actually change behavior. In this particular example, this is a physical environment that we're changing. Some of the outcomes of this change is that patient satisfaction scores went up by 90%. Some of the kids actually had so much fun in this adventure series, they actually wanted to come back the next day. And after these changes happened, an extreme minority of these kids needed sedation when they went through these procedures. So it was an example of a huge win because of an environmental change. Example number two is one that affects businesses all around the world. And the fundamental problem is employing more around retention. So the solution for this, according to a major study done by Northwestern and the University of Illinois, was pretty simple. Just include windows and your offices. What the research actually found was that if you have windows in your offices, your employers, your employees are happier and healthier and more active throughout the day. And so just one specific statistic that came out of this study was that employees actually had lower BMI scores and they actually slept better. So in the group of employees that had windows in their offices, on average, these employees actually slept 46 more minutes per night. Study number three is an example of an environmental change that wasn't fully thought out. And you may work in an open office. For those that aren't familiar, what an open office is, is that it's an office that encourages collaboration by breaking down physical barriers between employee workstations. So opposed to many of the walled-off cubicles that you had in the 1990s, let's break down all of those walls, which should, in theory, encourage people to collaborate. But what ended up happening, because this change wasn't fully thought out, was the fact that this change actually had the exact opposite consequence. So to put this into numbers, the Harvard Business School did a study of a large, global Fortune 500 multinational. After this business shifted to an open office, it found out that there were actually 73% less face-to-face interactions and that digital communication skyrocketed. As an example, email went up 67%, and instant messaging went up 75%. So this is an example about how a digital change actually had an unintended negative consequence. And so now that we've established how physical change can result in different human behaviors and outcomes, I want to start pivoting and talking about how this same principle applies to the digital world. Right now, we're coming out of the coronavirus pandemic here in the United States. And one of the things that we've experienced is that instead of people interacting in offices and in coffee shops, almost everything and work itself was done on digital platforms. So the applications that our businesses used, our chat platform, email. So how does application design influence human behavior? Well, the answer is application design actually hugely impacts human behavior. This is a picture of an iPhone. One of the things that you notice is that there's a proliferation now of notifications for all of your applications. Whenever I look at my phone, I usually have two or three of these notifications. And so now asking ourselves the question of why is this happening in the first place? The reason why this is happening is because it works. There was a large study that was done by a company called Braze, which is a customer engagement platform. Analyze tens of thousands of messaging campaigns by hundreds of application companies. What I found out is that by sending out the right notifications at the right time, you can actually drastically increase app and user retention. So what I mean by this is that after application initial download, the study found that if you send one push notification, this actually increased your application retention rate by 71%. It also found out that if you send out multiple notifications by different mediums. So for instance, you send out one email and then one text message or one text message and one push notification, then you can actually get this notification 130% increase in retention rate over baseline. So what I hope to establish here is the fact that application design actually really powerfully impacts human behavior. In this particular instance, customer retention rate. And before talking about some of the solutions that we have over here, I really want to start and highlight some of the problems in many of the digital environments around the world right now. And so the first problem and this is a problem of what I call complicated digital environments is what ends up happening is that you have lots of siloed organizations, especially I'm in the technology industry. We talk about silos among your different engineering teams. And so fundamentally, what ends up happening is in a siloed organization, you may have many different business units. And what ultimately happens is that these business units don't collaborate with each other. And so you have missed deadlines and missed opportunities to work on the same projects and to collaborate. So as an example, you may have one engineering team in Philadelphia. You may have another engineering team in Austin, Texas, and a final team in Portland, Oregon. And so what ends up happening when these teams don't collaborate is that you have lots and lots of missed opportunities. What I mean by this is that oftentimes you'll find out that one team is reproducing some work that another team has already done. I've seen that hundreds of times in my career. You also see that to just get information, I have to go request it from another team. And I have to set up a meeting with another team that may exist in another time zone. I may not even know who to request this information from. So I have to go ask someone who to request this information to, and that might take three to four different iterations before I finally get it right. Ultimately, how this affects businesses is that you have missed opportunities to collaborate and ultimately less efficient organizations. And so diving a little bit more into this problem, sometimes these siloed organizations is a product of tooling. If I have more tools, five, 10 tools, 10 tools, 15 tools, that's just going to make things more complicated. Imagine if your organization had instead of one chat platform, if each team had a separate chat form. So as an example, one team being on Microsoft Teams, another team being on Slack, another team being on IRC. Well, that's just going to naturally decrease the amount of collaboration that you have in your organization. Another times you have these silos according to geographical difference. So if one team's remote and another team is in the office, then that can create challenges as well. More on these siloed organizations, there are what I call operational silos. So I'm trying to collaborate, but I don't know how certain things work. So I have to go ask someone else in a different team because that information isn't accessible to me. And another type of silo is what I call a data silo. So if I'm trying to look up something, maybe customer data, sales data, something like that, I don't have access to the platform where that data is stored. That's on another team. And so ultimately, that requires me to set up a meeting with someone else, and that just slows down our entire organization. So to sort of highlight this section, if we have more complicated digital environments, we have more siloed organizations. One big study that dove into this issue of siloed organizations is a global CIO report by Dinah Trace. This was an interview of 700 IT leaders. And what it found out is that these type of silos affected 93% of organizations within the study. What really comes down to this, however, is the time wasted. 16% of all of IT's time it found in this study is spent simply chasing down information. So you really have to ask yourself the question, what is the value of that time to your business? One of the recommended steps for this study is the fact that what they, excuse me, what they recommended is investing in single platforms that enable cross team collaboration and visibility into an IT team's impact on business outcomes. So what I mean by that is if you invest in unified work platforms, you eliminate some of these silos that are in many organizations today. Example number two is I want to make this a little bit more human. A little bit about my background. I used to be a public school educator. I've worked with first graders, fifth graders, high schoolers, and I've done this for a number of years. And the fact of the matter is that in any organization, you're always going to have deviant behavior. And so as leaders, one of the things that we need to do is to create transparent environments so that deviant behavior is easy to spot out and to address. Deviant behavior thrives instead on opaque digital environments. So environments in which it's just not as transparent, not as easy to hold people accountable. Some of the research that goes into this in our particular industry of technology, 75% of IT professionals have reported being bullied at work. 21% of IT professionals in a separate study have actually reported being bullied in a single year. And among children, and I saw this a lot when I used to teach, was that around 59% of US teenagers have been bullied or harassed online. This becomes even more sad when you take into consideration that the types of harassment and the level of harassment actually correlates heavily with income. So teens from lower income families, they're more likely to get physical threats online, for instance. So one of the big questions is what can we do about it? When I was a teacher, when I was looking, very rarely did I have truly deviant behavior. And what ends up happening is people who want to do some of these things, they don't do them when the lights are on and when the teacher is looking. They do it in the dark hallways of the internet and through online platforms. That's the reason why cyber bullying is increasing as much as it is today. And so finally, asking ourselves the question of how do we turn on the lights on in our digital environments? How we do this is by building transparency into our digital environments. What I recommend for organizations around the world is to invest in unified and transparent digital work environments. So what I mean by that is for a unified work environment, instead of having five, 10, 15 tools, why not invest in one centralized platform for which large numbers of your organization and multiple teams can work out of that immediately breaks down some of our siloed organization problems and encourages cross-team collaboration. In terms of transparency, what I mean by that is as more people start investing in these platforms working out of it, it's much easier to see and spot deviant behavior. It's also easier for people to collaborate because I can see what everyone else is working on. It's much easier for me to contribute. And so let's now take a look at how this is done at GitLab. One of the things that you may not be aware of is the values that we have here at GitLab and collaboration and transparency are two of our central values. These are also values that we try to build into the GitLab platform itself. The idea is that we have designed GitLab so that naturally by adopting it, you get some of these benefits of collaboration and transparency. How do we do this? We do this by creating GitLab to be a platform where everyone can contribute. And so what I mean by this is lots of different types of engineers can work on the same platform, whether you're in development, whether you're in test, whether you're a DevOps engineer. But we also designed GitLab so that you can contribute on the platform itself if you're in the business side of things, if you're in operations, if you're in human resources. And so diving a little bit into the technical example, here we see a GitLab issue. People for multiple different teams are collaborating on this issue. And here's a merge request. A lot of times the best idea comes from outside of my team. Sometimes someone from another team is going to have some startling insight that I haven't considered. Because GitLab is one shared work platform for everyone, I am better put into a situation to get cross functional collaboration than I am on other platforms. So those two examples were examples of technical collaboration. But one of the things that you may not be aware of is the fact that people in the business side, they actually work and collaborate out of GitLab itself. And so over here you can see our marketing issue board. This is something that everyone can see. You don't have to be in the marketing group to see what people are working on. And so a lot of the time people from the sales side or people from product, they're actually looking up these marketing issues and collaborating on cross functional work. This is the marketing board. And this is the sales operations board. Virtually every single team here at GitLab has a public work board that other people can see and contribute to. So this is all an example of how GitLab is that shared work platform. And now let's talk about transparency. How we build transparency and embrace it as a company is by using the GitLab platform to create this thing called the GitLab handbook. And so what the GitLab handbook is, is it's one centralized location where I can go find out anything about anything happening in our company. The idea is that everything should be in the handbook because this allows for asynchronous communication. So as an example of this, here's a handbook page. We explain over here why we're handbook first. And as an example of this, something that's pretty maybe a little bit opaque in many businesses is how do we get a promotion? Do I talk to the right people? What sort of actions are required for me to get promoted? But because we are handbook first over here at GitLab, it's very obvious the things that management and leadership is looking for to qualify for promotion here at GitLab. All of our HR policies and procedures are clearly stipulated in the handbook itself. And so this page is for promotions. On the other side, the equation is under performance. All of this allows us to be super transparent as a company and allow people to know how to best motivate their behaviors and how to take their career. So now finally answering the question of what is the more human reason for DevOps platforms? And ultimately, it is a human reason. The more human reason for DevOps platforms is that DevOps platforms, which are shared work environments, enabling for better collaboration and transparency, that they unlock the best in the people that you bring onto your team. And they also have accountability mechanisms to create safeguards so that everyone can contribute in a safe way. Thank you.