At DataCamp, we started measuring employee engagement and satisfaction early on. We run these surveys regularly and anonymously using a platform called Culture Amp.

The results of these surveys provide our management and People team with important inputs on the health of the team. As a company, we make an effort to discuss these results individually and more broadly so that engagement insights can translate into substantive actions to create an environment where employees will thrive.

In this post, I’ll share the results from our June 2020 employee engagement survey, for which 76 of 101 total employees participated.

One of the nicest features Culture Amp provides is the ability to benchmark results against a large group of companies. This provides us with an understanding of where we can improve and where we’re excelling compared with our peers. DataCamp runs benchmarks against other companies in New Tech and Education.

Employee engagement

Culture Amp’s key outcome is Engagement, which measures the level of connection, motivation, and commitment a person feels for the place they work. At DataCamp, 79% of our employees score favorable, 14% neutral, and 7% unfavorable. This brings us into the top 25% for both our benchmarks: New Tech and Education.

Diving a bit deeper

If we dive a bit deeper, we see similar scores for each individual question in the survey.

Looking at the absolute scores, the following three questions score the highest among DataCamp employees:

Our employees join DataCamp because they want to be part of a fast-growing environment, surrounded by mission-driven people (in our case, committed to democratizing data science education), and they want to solve difficult challenges (of which we have plenty). I’m happy to see that almost 90% of employees recommend DataCamp as a great place to work (with neutral at 6%).

Looking at the other two top-scoring questions, it becomes clearer as to why DataCamp is a great place to work: our employees have great role models and know what is needed to be successful. Both are key elements of creating a work environment where people can develop and grow.

When we rank our scores against the benchmarks of New Tech and Education, we notice that:

• We score over 14 (New Tech) and 17 (Education) percentage points higher compared to the average for the question “I rarely think about looking for a job at another company.”
• Two other areas that stand out when comparing DataCamp results with the general results of New Tech and Education are our high scores on the questions “DataCamp is a great company for me to make a contribution to my development,” and “I receive appropriate recognition for good work at DataCamp.”

Being at the crossroads of education and technology, personal development and learning is very important to our team members. We support them by providing personal training budgets and making sure they can work on complex problems with talented people. At DataCamp, we believe that building a team full of smart and passionate people enables everyone to become better at what they do.

For transparency, I also want to share our lowest-scored question:

When a company grows as fast as DataCamp, things can get chaotic at times. That might be manageable with a small team of 20 people, but with 100+ employees in three countries around the world, scaling the business with more structure is key. As a company, we’re trying to find the right balance between getting the proper systems and processes in place, and remaining nimble enough for innovation to thrive. For example, we’ve recently invested in getting the proper infrastructure in place for our Sales and Customer Success teams, improved our processes for information management, and streamlined our instructor application process.

To measure is to know

At DataCamp, we’re big fans of tools like CultureAmp and Lattice to understand employee engagement and satisfaction in a quantitative way. We use these insights to identify clear actions and focus areas for our people, and to hold managers accountable for the well-being of their teams.

Join the DataCamp team!

We’re always looking for new talent. If you’re passionate about democratizing education in data science and analytics and ready for a new challenge, explore our careers page.

Want to learn more about what life is like at DataCamp? Read some of our employee spotlights and get excited:

• Adel Nehme, Content Developer
• Aimee Gott, Head of Skill Assessment Content
• Cat Powers, Customer Success Manager, Enterprise Enablement
• James (Mac) Stephens, Customer Success Manager
• Kelsey McNeillie, Instructor Recruiter
• Maria Barbosa, Software Engineer
• Mehdi El Hamzaoui, Senior Corporate Account Executive
• Nuno Rafael Rocha, Engineering Manager
• Shirley Lin, Software Engineer