Ways of working are like the scaffolding on a building that is being put up or renovated. The scaffolding is not the work but the complex network of steel pipes, couplers, braces, ties and ledgers make the work possible, safe and productive.
Most of our knowledge about how to work in teams is learnt through doing from school to university to workplace and to our social and civic lives. In our workplaces we often inherit how teams work as part of the unwritten rules around ‘how we do things here’. The rules for when and how often we meet, how decisions are made and recorded and how we communicate are can be seen as inevitable and immovable but they can all be up for grabs if we want them to be.
In our team canvas we included four questions for thinking about ways of working.
- How does your team manage its work?
- How often and why is your team meeting?
- How do you document your decisions and discussions?
- How well, and in what ways, do you communicate?
Why not undertake a quick review of your current ways of working? You could use an online survey tool such as Google Forms, Typeform or Survey Monkey to get and collate people’s input quickly.
Here are some prompts around key areas you might want to adapt for your own context.
Meetings
- Frequency: too often: not often enough: about right?
- Duration: too long: too short: could we vary the duration?
- Format: how formal/informal; does our meeting structure enable us to pay attention to the right things?
- Who gets invited? Do we always invite everyone? Could we make use of smaller groups?
- Beyond Zoom/Teams how might we use other tools such as Miro or Mural?
Documentation
- What information do we circulate in advance of our meetings?
- Do we have an agenda?
- Do we record our discussions? Do we need to?
- How do we enable people who couldn’t attend to catch up?
Decision making
- How well we understand the purpose of each meeting?
- How do we reach decisions? Is the process transparent and fair?
- Do we revisit or unpick our decisions often?
- How well do we deal with disagreement and dissent?
- How do we document our decisions?
- How do we share our decisions with others who need to know about them?
Communications
- How do we communicate between meetings? Options vary from email, phone and zoom to online collaboration tools such as Monday, Basecamp, Miro, Mural and ClickUp.
- Which tools do we use to communicate? Do they work well? Are there others we could try?
- What types of information do we need to communicate? Could we use different methods for different types?
- What types of information is falling between the cracks?
For each area you could simply ask
- What works well?
- What doesn’t work well?
- Suggest some ideas for how we could improve
Circulate and discuss the results. What do you see? What do you want to change?
Tips
- Is your technology driving your behaviour in unhelpful ways? We are seeing a lot of meetings whose duration seems more determined by the choices offered in scheduling tools than by choice. It is also leading to a lot of unhealthy back to back meetings.
- Don’t try and change everything at once, especially now when many of us are struggling with the idea of yet more change.
- Focus on one or two areas that could make a big difference. Try out the new approach for a few weeks and see if it helps. Experiment.
- Consider including a quick check out session at the end of some of your team meetings. Ask yourselves, what went well and what you might want to change. Agree on one thing you will do differently next time.
One of the many challenges arising from the pandemic is that we can feel like we have no agency. Rethinking how your team works can be one way of taking back some of that precious agency.
Susan and Dawn