Few workplace terms are simultaneously as beloved and elusive as ‘engagement’. Bound to appear in almost any document about performance metrics or setting goals, it emphasizes how invested we are into feeling invested in our work.

We all know this feeling: whereas discipline can carry you through doing the mundane and the necessary, only engagement can fuel motivation and put you into a state of flow, when you’re hunting the end goal, rather than dragging your feet toward it.

But what fuels engagement? Exness is always looking for answers to this question, and every discovery feels like hitting a motivational jackpot. This is exactly what happened at the recent Exness Hackathon 2024 – an internal competitive employee event organized by a small crew that achieved big results. Among them is Sofia Kalashnikova, Developer Relations Manager in Internal Communications, who kindly provided us with insights into the highly engaging and fruitful event, and what it takes to organize one.

By Exness, for Exness

Making cool exciting things happen outside the regular work hours and obligations is integral to the Exness culture. 

Whether it’s through celebrating cultural diversity or building community with a talent show, the lasting impressions and freshly established connections from these events contribute to a healthy and productive work environment. We wanted to go a step further and organize an event that contributes to work directly while being entertaining and rewarding to everyone involved.

This brought us to a hackathon – a collaborative yet competitive event that brings people together for a fun but productive time. The idea was pitched by our Head of IT Sergey Baskakov, who was inspired by several positive experiences of big companies hosting similar events. Any potential similarities would end at the conceptualization stage though: instead of copying tasks or chasing trends, we aimed to make our hackathon as Exness-specific as possible.

The recipe for planned success

Cooking up a successful event like that requires three main ingredients: a dedicated organizer team, a clear goal, and an active employee audience.

The benefit of assembling a dedicated team is that it doesn’t have to be big: apart from Sergey himself who pitched the idea and took the role of overseeing and assisting throughout the process, the project was carried out by event manager Anya Glazyrina, designer Olga Chernikova, and myself. Although it seems like a challenging feat for just a few people – and it was – connecting, synchronizing, and distributing responsibilities had proven to be simple and straightforward.

Just like the primary goals that we’ve set separately for the business and the people:

1. Business-oriented – to tackle existing company challenges or discover untapped issues, and find unorthodox or less-than-obvious solutions that may have had no time or opportunity to shine during regular workflow.
2. People-oriented – to create natural collaboration, incentivizing employees to rally, form teams, build horizontal connections, and become more familiar outside the habitual work environment.

Getting people on board was all about setting proper expectations – both for ourselves and any potential participants. We’ve also estimated the potential number of participants based on previous competitive events, and planned our budget – including the 10.000 EUR prize pool.

Luckily for us, we had another rare and luxurious ingredient – time. Having started preparing almost 6 months before the event, at times it felt a bit premature. But having the time to research, brainstorm, discuss, and engage in creative thinking without the pressure of a deadline looming on the horizon has proven to be both refreshing and productive.

Setting the box to think outside of

For an interactive event to be attractive, it has to be specific.

We had to establish transparent and understandable rules and communicate a clear process to our employees so that they would have nothing to worry about except making a good hackathon project.

The Hackathon was decidedly a teams-only affair: no individual contributors allowed. Not that we doubt the capabilities of any single Exnessian on their own, but teams have a much lower chance of canceling at the last moment and naturally introduce collaboration to the process.

Each registered team could choose to either contribute their own idea of improving Exness business and processes or pick one of the tasks proposed by our Technology and development representatives. The options weren’t exactly equal, so we had to balance them out by giving the teams with their own ideas extra time to prepare, and publishing the pre-made tasks for the other teams just 3 days before the start of the competition.

The hackathon itself would span two days of intense offline collaboration involving brainstorming, development, and preparing a pitch for the jury consisting of high-level managers. Dedicated experts were invited to review the teams’ efforts midway, and help them make the necessary adjustments to ensure their work is good to go for the pitch. During the pitch day itself, each team had 10 minutes to present their working software solutions and answer jury questions. The jury would then announce the 3 winning teams, but they also had separate optional team awards to give out for outstanding achievements regardless of winning.

Most importantly, the victorious teams’ software solutions would be considered for implementation and support on an official company level.

When reality exceeds expectations

In event management, it’s common for things not to go as expected. But every once in a while, it’s for the better.

Ensuring that all pre-made tasks were current and relevant to Exness at the moment of the hackathon required communicating with most of our C-level managers and gathering any problems that required resolution but weren’t given the time or priority before. The managers were happy to contribute, even encouraging their teams to participate in the hackathon. We’ve gathered a total of 15 tasks for various divisions including Payments, Customer Support & Sales, Security, Trading, IT, and HR, proving there’s never a shortage of issues awaiting resolution.

On the other hand, there was no shortage of Exnessians willing to offer their hand in providing their solutions: we expected up to 15 teams to register for the hackathon, but ended up with 22 – all highly motivated and engaged. Despite one of the hackathon days being a weekend, and offline presence being welcome but voluntary, the office building was packed with people buzzing with communication, hard work, and even stressing over making their ideas functional and presentable. It was at that time when our only organizational hiccup occurred, as our catering wasn’t prepared for full offline participation, forcing us to make some hasty orders to feed the working minds.

The jury had also thrown a curveball at our established rules, identifying two teams as equally worthy of the third place and awarding both the full prize for the winning position. But having more winners than anticipated is a good enough reason to bend the hackathon rules a bit.

The aftermath of creativity

Naturally, every Exness Hackathon participant was awarded in some way – from gift bags with quality goodies to actual monetary prizes equally distributed between team members. But some rewards for being a part of the event were priceless. Being recognized for a passion project done literally in two days, and having the opportunity to further develop it within the company as part of your regular job is truly engaging.

With that in mind, we’ve been contacting various stakeholders across Exness to find real application for most if not all hackathon projects, and will be checking back on the approved ones in the future to make sure they’re moving forward – just as we keep moving forward to new engaging ways to boost our business and motivate our employees.