“They say that if you’re in leadership of let’s say, 100 people, you usually only deal with the problems, right? It’s good to see a stream of information that shows people are appreciating each other for doing a great job… Matter helps leadership notice little things that they would normally miss because it wasn’t being shared at their level, and everyone feels good across the board.”
Company: Since 1847, Siemens has created technology that empowers customers to transform their businesses so that they can impact the world. Together with their customers and ecosystem partners, they are helping to change the lives of billions of people for the better.
Industry: Application Lifecycle Management
Employees: 10,000+
Headquarters: Czech Republic 🇨🇿, India 🇮🇳, and Germany 🇩🇪
Key Use Cases: Kudos, Feedback Friday
Interview: Martin P., SAFe® Program Consultant
Before Siemens' Polarion ALM teams began working from home due to Coronavirus, it was easy to stay in social contact with each other, and give recognition in retrospectives, town halls, or all hands-meetings. The team even implemented a Niko-Niko Calendar – a visual tool used to catalog teammate’s moods and energy levels over time by checking in each day. This all became much more challenging when COVID hit, and everyone began working from home. Martin saw how much it affected the team’s interpersonal relationships.
The team missed casually chatting about work and recognizing others by saying things like “Hey guys, you did an amazing job on that project, way to go!” So, he hoped to implement a system to restart interpersonal communication and recognition throughout the team while everyone was working from home.
Martin first heard of Matter through a social media post – someone mentioned that their team was using Matter to give kudos and appreciate each other, noting value in the product. Upon further research, he loved that Matter was able to connect to Slack (where the team does all communication) and that it was very easy to install and introduce to the team.
“As leadership, we wanted to bring in a tool to help the team recognize each other for all of the awesome things they do. It was easy to introduce something new through Slack, which the team already loves using.”
The Polarion team’s Matter channel started quite small, and grew organically over time. At first, Martin only invited a few members to the Matter channel, introducing it as a kudos system for the team. As people sent kudos to more teammates across the company or added colleagues to the Slack channel, these new teammates would start sending kudos, and the cycle continued. It turned into a snowball effect, and the channel continues to grow. Out of their 151 team members on Slack, 82 and counting are using Matter.
Siemens uses Matter for team recognition and socialization with our Kudos and Feedback Friday features, and fondly refers to Matter as their team’s “Kudos System”.
The Polarion team has seen Matter bring recognition into the limelight of their culture. Martin has received feedback from leadership that people are happier, and teammates feel great when other people recognize when they’re going above and beyond for the team.
What surprised Martin was how easily Matter was adopted by the whole team. He mentioned that Matter’s learning curve is very fast, and people on the team were using it from week one with no issues. He loves that it’s been a hassle-free tool – there’s little to no management needed as MatterBot shows people how to use the product and takes care of engagement.
Martin’s advice for others who are considering Matter, “Try Matter in a small team and see how it goes, and let it naturally grow. Don’t push the product from the top down so it feels forced, let people find it and share it with others across the team as they honor them with a kudos. Let your team know that this is a tool for them to use, at their discretion. I see teammates leaving other Slack culture channels like book clubs, etc. – things that felt required or spammy, but no one has left the Matter channel, and it feels like a natural part of our team's culture.”
