Janet Carmody, Head of Culture at Motorola Solution shed light on the cultural impact hackathons have in a remote work era.
"One of the biggest reasons for running our all-hands hackathon is to try and bridge startup culture in a Fortune 500 company. It really started to take shape during lockdown and remote work. We didn't have a mandate to go back to the office. So a lot of our creators and developers are still working remotely. We wanted to create a sense of what hackathons used to be and enable sharing skills across the globe."
Related: Watch our webinar with Okta, Estée Lauder Companies, and SAP to learn about driving AI innovation with internal hackathons.
Successful internal hackathons iceland telegram screening extend far beyond engineering teams. Tony Hernandez, Chief Architect at JLL Technologies, describes how hackathons connect global teams and help upskill team members in all departments.
"Our hackathons drive collaboration between teams that are global in nature,” said Tony Hernandez, JLL Technologies. “Most recently, we've been trying to bring in more of our business partners into this hackathon world and drive collaboration across more than just engineering teams."
"Last year's hackathon was all focused on AI, specifically GenAI,” he added. “So that was new for a lot of folks and a great way for people to get first-hand experience playing with this new technology and seeing the art of the possible."
Create a shakeup from regular work
Successful hackathons inject energy and playfulness into corporate culture. Trey shared how leaning into this helps get teams at Toyota excited to participate.
"The event has been more of that startup type culture—that playfulness in terms of the theme and the tone—that people don't want to miss it," said Trey.
This playful spirit extends to leadership participation. Janet shared how some executives tapped into the playful energy by changing their names on Slack to match the hackathon’s deep-sea theme. For example, she shared that Motorola Solutions’ CTO Mahesh Saptharishi changed his name to ‘Shark-tharishi’ during the hackathon.