What's the Company Culture Like at McMaster-Carr?

What recent decision best reflected your values — and what changed as a result?

One recent decision that reflected my values was structuring our project teams around specific SMART goals. It’s helped keep us nimble, tightly scoped and focused on clear outcomes. Projects move forward with more efficiency and clarity and people feel empowered knowing their work ties directly to measurable impact. It’s also made it easier to talk about our work with other software engineering teams, since our goals are clear and progress is straightforward to share.

We consider these collaborative activities engineering practices that accelerate and amplify our work. Our ability to deliver new features to customers each week comes from our deliberate discipline of working together to elevate outcomes.

How do you recognize impact fairly — and what’s the return on investment?

So much of our work at McMaster-Carr is accomplished by teams operating collaboratively. From project kick‑off to troubleshooting to celebrating wins, we do so as a team. Individual contributions don’t go unnoticed, as an impartial review process via a detailed competency framework ensures impact is recognized and promotions are earned on merit. The results speak for themselves, with strong career growth and many colleagues choosing to spend their entire careers here because they feel valued and treated fairly.

2 collaboration habits that keep work moving at Mcmaster-Carr

• Daily scrums — We use these 30 minute touchpoints to celebrate progress, elevate and resolve blockers and coordinate changes across the team.
• Weekly synchronous code reviews — We use these meetings to walk through important, complex and wide-reaching changes as a team. These conversations give us a chance to share our mental model for the work, chat through alternatives we considered, receive feedback from our teammates and refine our testing and rollout plans.